Endless Pantheon: Visions of the Pantheon
by Todeswind
Summary: A companion piece to Gods Eye told from the perspective of the various Goa'uld as they react to the chaos that Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden has unleashed upon the Galaxy at large. It's a big galaxy, but nowhere is quite big enough to hide hurricane Dresden.
1. Chapter 1

Ba'al pulled the blade from his shoulder with a snarl of pain and frustration, discarding the steel blade upon the floor of the transport ship. His yellow shirt turned crimson as the blood seeped forth from the wound. It would have been enough to kill a human without the healing powers of a Goa'uld, even without the poison he was entirely certain that the Minoan goddess of serpents coated her blades with. It was a mostly symbolic gesture given that the Goa'uld were virtually immune to all poisons or diseases, but it would likely have dispatched any human who displeased the goddess.

The pain in his shoulder was subordinate to the satisfaction at the memory of what he'd done to the one who caused his injury. He'd not been gentle when he'd ejected the goddess from the transport ship, and the Jaffa loyal to Apophis had been close enough to capture the wounded goddess. Assuming that the Jaffa did not dispatch her on the spot, she would be brought back to their master for re-education. She would be tortured and resurrected until she was willing to swear the necessary oaths of loyalty to serve in Apophis' newly reforming pantheon.

His transport rumbled suspiciously, its aging engine hissing a complaint at the speeds he was requiring it to reach. He was pushing the limits of what was physically possible for a Goa'uld transport ship, having made some minor modifications to the crystal configuration in the ship's engines. It would likely never be space-worthy again after this flight but given that he'd forced three hundred percent of the normal operating power out of it, the sacrifice felt worth it.

He leaned back in the pilot's chair, focusing on knitting together his host's flesh as he watched the curved display of the ship's tactical readout. The glowing red triangle was still gaining speed at an alarming rate, fast enough that Ba'al wasn't entirely convinced that it wasn't going to be able to overtake him. He cursed his luck. Of course Qetesh would be able to secure an Al'kesh while he languished in an unarmed transport, the slippery bitch always seemed to be able to talk her way into our out of whatever she needed.

He had no evidence to support his assertion that he ship following him was, in fact Qetesh's vessel, but he just knew that it had to be her. There had been precious few of his old powers that survived the terms of surrender to the Furlings, but Ba'al retained a preternatural sensitivity when it came to immediate danger to his person. His instinctual reactions to a given threat seemed able to guide him from danger, often allowing him to enact countermeasures to threats he hadn't even realized were even possible at the time he'd enacted them. Ba'al trusted his instincts and right now his instincts were telling him that Qetesh was on that Al'kesh, hungering for his blood.

"Damn Heka to the pits of Netu. Damn him to the blackest scraps of the Empty Night." Ba'al swore, lamenting the lack of a cloaking device on his vessel. Why hadn't that shameful excuse for a god just stayed on his planet and remained in shameful exile? How did he dare to socialize with the rest of the pantheon as though he weren't the architect of their ultimate demise? Thoth's confidant and longest friend had no place among the civilized members of society.

Heka had made Ba'al's skin crawl even in the times of Apep. He was hungry for power in a way that unnerved him, fond of violence that seemed entirely unnecessary for one to rule. Ba'al held no special love for the chattel but it was rather difficult to rule the dead. well it was for most. Heka hadn't ever been particularly limited in that regard. Thoth may have discovered the Sarcophagus and its powers, but Heka had turned the science into a twisted and macabre form of art.

If Ba'al was honest, there was a certain degree of envy in his hatred of Heka. The man held sway over forces of nature even before the ritual of necromantic ascension and his abilities had only grown in the times that followed. But Ba'al had focused his efforts on learning skills that would benefit his holdings rather than the esoteric and violent interests of Heka, control of the weather and rain to ensure fertile crops in inhospitable places. Belief was the greatest resource a god could have, and greater populations meant a more potent supply of belief.

Or rather it had been the most potent resource a god could have, before Heka enforced the cruelest terms imaginable upon his own people. Ba'al could still feel the whispering taste of belief just beyond his reach, the well of power close enough to taste as it was whisked away from him. He could sip at but the meagerest drabs of true power, serving as little more than painful reminder of when he had once been able to command the forces of the universe. Once he had been able to command the heavens, now he was just a footnote in the religious texts of gods more powerful than he.

He ran a finger over the bloody patch of flesh, examining the scabbed over skin. It was going to leave a scar, one large enough that he doubted that the sarcophagus would be able to remove it entirely. It was unsightly, but not enough for him to discard his host body. Not when his host was effectively his only remaining conduit to the life he had once led. His face was the face that had defied the god of the Israelites for centuries, this body the body which had once broken lesser gods and demons. In truth, it was no more or less potent a host than any other - the terms of surrender having robbed it of most of the magical potential it once held - but he retained a fondness for it that he hadn't yet overcome.

Ba'al chewed his lip, watching the Al'kesh draw closer and closer to his transport - matching heading and bearing. There was no possible way for Ba'al to reach his holdings in time and any attempt to land his ship on a planet would just open him up to the Al'kesh's guns. He couldn't hope to outmaneuver it or outgun it, so he'd have to out-think it. And while his former powers had diminished, his mind was quite entirely intact.

He changed the direction of his transport and was gratified to see the Al'kesh struggling to made the course correction. Their craft would plow past the transport moving in a straight line, but it was bulky and didn't corner well. It would increase their pursuit of him by seconds. Seconds he desperately needed. Ba'al activated his long range communicator and sent off a wide-band transmission to his intended destination. It meant that his pursuers would be able to intercept the communication, but he needed to be certain that it reached the intended recipients.

He typed the words that he was certain would save him from Qetesh's fury, knowing full well that it meant he was going to be in debt to a Pantheon he neither knew much about nor held any particular love for his deeds. He was loath to subordinate himself but given the option between subordination and death, he would choose the former. Even if it meant he was subordinating himself to someone he couldn't hope to match in power, it was the better option in the long run.

A minute passed, then two, then three before the ship's computer chimed, letting him know that his message had been received. By minute five he was actually perspiring in discomfort watching the Al'kesh accelerate. It would only be a few more minutes before he crossed over the border, he would be able to avoid Qetesh for that long, but if they didn't extend him an offer of safe passage prior to encroaching on the space held by a rival pantheon he'd have greater threats than Qetesh to worry about. A Ha'tak could destroy both spacecraft even without a supporting fleet - and there would be a supporting fleet.

His heart nearly skipped a beat in relief when he received a reply, offering safe passage in exchange for the price he offered. Blood of Apep but it would cost him dearly. He steeled himself for what came next, slowing his ship and deactivating the hyperspace window to re-enter real space. The red triangle of Qetesh's Al'kesh was upon him in an instant, popping out of hyperspace and looming over Ba'al's unarmed spacecraft.

Any intended violence was immediately forestalled as Ba'al's plan came to fruition and a fleet of Lord Yu's forces came to impose their territorial boundaries. Faced with twelve Ha'tak, Qetesh had no choice but to turn and flee the superior firepower. Ba'al's grin stretched across his exhausted face, enjoying the imagined sound of the goddess' petulant fury at once again having been bested by her betters.

He hobbled over to the ring transporter, his leg responding slower than it ought to have done. Odd, he didn't even remember having hurt his knee. It's funny the things one misses in the heat of combat. His leg managed not to collapse under him as he reached the rings, allowing him to stand upright as a column of light materialized in his ship - revealing a tall Jaffa of Asian origins.

The Jaffa was apparently unarmed, his clothing marking him as a courtier of the Pantheon of Lord Yu rather than a soldier. The Pantheons of Yu were unusual, even by the standards of the Goa'uld, employing a complex system of bureaucracy and aristocracy to ensure an orderly procession of Yu's Kingdom. This Jaffa, if one could even call him that given how little the man would actually be involved in the practice of fighting a war, was a bureaucrat bred for the purpose interacting with the Goa'uld on behalf of his master.

The Jaffa bowed to Lord Ba'al, pressing his hands together in a way that made his long, hanging sleeves seem to envelop the top half of his body so that only is tall hat poked over the bright green silk. He waited there, bowed low, for Ba'al to address him. Well, Ba'al couldn't fault the Jaffa for his manners - the creature did know how to address his betters. "You may rise."

"This one thanks you for your indulgence Lord Ba'al. The great and powerful Yu welcomes you to his realms and bids you safe passage." Replied the Jaffa. "This one is known as Chancelor Win, and is proud to see to your needs."

"Lord Yu is here? In person?" Ba'al hadn't expected the ancient System Lord to stray so far from his places of power. The enigmatic System Lord was one of the few Goa'uld to be allowed to retain his mantle, but only within the confines of his capitol world. If he were ever to depart it, the ravages of time and age would affect his mind as much as it did any other Goa'uld who'd been a victim of Heka's treachery.

"It is my great lament to inform you that the most magnificent Lord Yu is unable greet you in person. I am currently in the service of the Queen Consort Xiwangmu. It is she who has command of this fleet." Chancelor Win spread his hands, raising his arms and continuing to keep his head bowed in apparent deference to the Goa'uld System Lord before him. There was an edge of pride to the Jaffa's scrupulous deference that Ba'al did not care for – a sensation that the Jaffa's actions were born out of formality rather than any genuine respect for the System Lord before him. "Shall I transport you to Ulan-Tze aboard the flagship of this fleet or do you prefer to continue in this… vessel?"

The implied insult against his transport was anything but subtle. Ba'al bristled at the apparent insolence of it but could find no actual cause to seek retribution on the bureaucrat, not when he was relying upon Yu's forces to ferry him to safety. "I will accept your offer of safe passage. This ship is… unlikely to survive further exertion."

"Of course, my Lord Ba'al." The Jaffa smiled. "If you would be so kind as to step into the rings."

Transportation to the flagship took only seconds, the dingy and smoke filled transport ship quickly vanishing to be replaced with the interior of a Ha'tak warship. Xiwangmu's flagship was atypical of a Goa'uld vessel, having opted for the use of jade, rather than gold in the construction of the ship's defenses. The Pantheon of Yu had never been overly open in their dealings with the rest of the Goa'uld, deferring to Ra's authority but otherwise having chosen to keep to themselves and their own dealings without particular interest in the other bloodlines. Even at the height of the Goa'uld Empire, when Lord Yu's power might well have encompassed that of Ra or Apophis if he'd cared to exercise it, the Goa'uld Lord hadn't demonstrated any overt aspirations for greater power than what he already held – a trend that he'd retained even after the Heka's "peace" with the Furlings had been imposed upon the Pantheons.

It was something of an oddity in Ba'al's mind given how little of Lord Yu's power had been taken away. Those few gods who'd been allowed to retain a semblance of their former powers had just retreated to obscurity – with the notable exception of Ra, who's powers seemed to have been largely allowed so that he could continue to enforce the terms of surrender. Yu, if properly motivated, could have easily made a play to become the new Supreme System Lord. He had not done so, choosing instead to wage limited wars and only conquer those Goa'uld who could not be disabused of their aspirations to take Lord Yu's territory.

Ba'al's teeth clenched in pain as he placed his hand against the carved Jade depictions of birds in flight and the sweeping countryside of Yu's domain, detecting the powerful magics flowing through the Jade with even his own emaciated talent. Lord Yu's fleet still retained powerful protections against spiritual and magical incursions aboard his vessels. More than that, the Jade Emperor's magics were _recent_. He pulled his hand away from the jade, unaccountably worried that the spells might strike out against him in spite of knowing that no System Lord would ward his ship against the Goa'uld.

He followed the Jaffa through the opulent interior of the ship, walking through room after room of painted wood and potted plants placed with scrupulous attention to how they would affect the flow of ambient energies through the ship. Jaffa and humans went about their business as they passed, single mindedly focusing themselves upon their tasks. Ba'al wasn't even entirely sure what they were doing. Rows of men knelt on wooden reed mats, going over ledgers with obsessive interest as women walked among them, serving tea and sweet-smelling cakes.

Jaffa warriors stood protectively around them, but gave the impression of being guardians rather than enforcers. If Ba'al's admittedly limited knowledge of Yu's bureaucratic rankings was accurate, he was reasonably certain that the garments worn by the humans actually marked them as being higher status than their Jaffa watchers. A curious habit, allowing humans to believe themselves superior to the Jaffa. Ba'al would have thought any human allowed that degree of autonomy would have rebelled against their betters long ago, but he couldn't claim to have an Empire as powerful as that of Lord Yu either. His own territories had been shrinking as of late, resulting in the indignity of supplicating himself to the late Lord Sokar.

The bridge of the Flagship was more conventional, a tall throne made of Jade and petrified wood sat atop a plinth in front of several raised pedestals that controlled the functions of the ship. The Jaffa bureaucrat made no move for the seat, nor did he offer it to Lord Ba'al. It was neither his to use nor to offer, and Ba'al understood it as such. For either one of them to even acknowledge it would have been an insult to Xiwangmu's authority and an impropriety as a guest of another Goa'uld pantheon. That did not stop Ba'al from examining the throne thoroughly and finding it wanting for nothing. It managed to display the opulence of Xiwangmu's resources without managing to be either gaudy or, unless he misjudged the cushions, uncomfortable. Xiwangmu wanted those in her court to know how wealthy she was, but not at the cost of her own comfort. A sensible decision that remarkably few Goa'uld chose to make.

But the Matron of Yu's court had a reputation for sensibility, at least in most things. Her utter and irrational loyalty to her husband, Lord Yu, was a matter for which she had historically displayed a most un-Goa'uld like inflexibility. She had been Lord Yu's consort since before the fall of Apep, and thought she was reportedly no longer able to bear him children, she held a jealous love for the Jade Emperor and a an entirely Goa'uld like spitefulness for anyone who dared to endager his health and happiness. Ba'al's continued survival would hinge greatly upon not offending Xiwangmu's sense of propriety. Hopefully she would not be too angry with him having sided with Marduk against her Lord in the early years after Thoth's Folly before it became clear what was really going on.

Win addressed his second in command in hushed tones, speaking to the other Jaffa in a language that was not one with which Ba'al was familiar. Their conversation was lively, but not overly anxious. Ba'al suspected that it wasn't intended as an insult against him, reputedly only the highest-ranking bureaucrats of Yu's pantheon received an education in the Goa'uld tongue. Yu had not required his people to learn the language nor had he prohibited them reading and writing – yet another choice that Ba'al felt was too risky to allow for any but the most trusted of servants.

Having finished his discussion with the other Jaffa, Win returned to wait on Ba'al. "My apologies for the interruption, Lord Ba'al. I needed to delegate command of the fleet to another vessel so that this one can transport you to my Lady. Our mission must continue."

"And what mission would that be?" Ba'al asked, fully expecting to be provided a half-truth by the Jaffa.

To his surprise, the Jaffa didn't even bother to prevaricate. "We have been dispatched to find Nekheb."

Ba'al raised an eyebrow at that. "I'm reasonably certain that your star charts should be sufficient in resolving that."

"No my Lord, I fear that this one has been inadequate in conveying meaning. We are aware of where Nekheb once was. We have been dispatched to discover where it has gone." Win shook his head in sad frustration. "It is a most puzzling affair."

"The _system_ of Nekheb is missing?" Ba'al replied in incredulity. "Heka cloaked a _system_?"

"No. It is not hidden. It is gone." Win replied. "Unoccupied. The space where once it stood lies empty. No rubble, no debris, no light, nothing. It is gone."

"You can't disappear a _star system_." Ba'al's face curled as though he'd bitten into a particularly pungent lemon. "Nekheb is gargantuan. The main planet alone is twice the size of Delmak. There are moons, planets, _a damn star_. Even if you destroyed it there should be debris."

"And yet there is _nothing_ my Lord." Replied Win. "This one confesses that it is most irregular. It is beyond this one's ability to explain and yet it is without question irrefutable fact that the entire system of Nekheb no longer exists. Therefore, this one has been sent to find how such a thing might come to be, and consequently how such a thing might come to be prevented. This one would gladly seek any insight that one as great as you could shed in the matter, Lord Ba'al."

Ba'al's blood ran cold at the implication. Someone had developed a method of disappearing an entire star system. A weapon? A method of concealment beyond anything seen since before Thoth's Folly? There were few possibilities for what might have happened that didn't bode ill for the future, save the one glimmering ray of hope that Heka might have died in whatever fate befell his systems. One did have to look for the positive things in life, after all. Ba'al considered re-directing the question and implying greater knowledge than he actually had, but it was probably best to err on the side of honest while a guest. "I am unaware of how such a feat might be accomplished."

"This one regrets having placed you in a position of being unable to answer this one's question. No offense was intended." Win bowed his head, seemingly sincere in his apology. It was, after all, rude to ask a question for which ones guest might be made to look ignorant. The insult was minor however, and the boon of having been granted knowledge of Nekheb's disappearance was more than sufficient compensation for the slight.

The trip to Ulan-Tze was a remarkably pleasant one. Win, a trained courtier, was a more than acceptable host. Ba'al having lost his Jaffa escorts and human servants on Delmak was waited on by human's in Win's employ who were, even by his own exacting standards, entirely adequate in seeing to his needs. He wasn't overly fond of the garments provided to him by Win, they were crafted in the styles favored by Yu's pantheon, but they were opulent enough to satisfy Ba'al's needs and clearly had been crafted for him specifically. The elaborate interwoven silk shirt bore a dancing ram riding a thunder cloud, which while not his preferred style of tight leather, was an entirely serviceable display of his crest.

He even found himself actively enjoying the company of the Jaffa bureaucrat. Win was invested in the propriety of seeing to Ba'al's needs even if he held no special love for the System Lord, and had been active in making sure that Ba'al was entertained in transit. The flagship employed a number of amenities that Ba'al would not have considered necessary on a warship, not the least of which were philosophers and poets. The room of men scribbling into books he had seen when first he'd arrived transpired to be great thinkers and speakers, men who'd been given the duty of transcribing their complex thought to papers so that they might present their works entertain Lady Xiwangmu. He had watched several plays dealing with the complexities of a famous family of human nobility for Ulan-Tze whose collective greed eventually resulted in their downfall for having betrayed the Lady Xiwangmu. He found their imitation of the family's eventual punishment to be especially gratifying.

By the time they actually reached the world of UIan-Tze he was almost disappointed to have to leave. Win hadn't even tried to assassinate him nor had there been any apparent efforts at assassination requiring Wins men to intercede. As times in the control of a rival went, it was remarkably uneventful.

His first impression of the world of Ulan-Tze was that of a paradise. The city of Kweilin's sweeping oriental architecture wrapped up and around the steep cliffs of a great spire of white stone topped with a bright red palace, giving the distinct impression that it was one giant structure rather than the metropolis of millions he knew it to be. The ring platform Win transported them to was at the edge of the metropolis rather than in the palace itself. Ba'al knew that this was a conscious choice on the part of the bureaucrat, a way of simultaneously displaying the sheer scope of Kweilin City and reminding Ba'al that however important the System Lord might be external to Xiwangmu's realm, he was not the most important person here.

Win was not entirely without propriety though. When they arrived a phalanx of Jaffa warriors were waiting for them with a litter for Ba'al to ride in. He would never admit it, but he was actually somewhat glad to have to make the trip. Kweilin was actually impressive enough of a city to merit taking the time to be carried through it. The streets of Kweilin actually went through the heart of the mountain, great caverns having been bored through the stone pillar to connect the rising levels of the city. It didn't even seem possible for the huge structures to hang off the high precipices and steep angles of the mountain, but entire fortresses and apartments had been built seemingly in defiance of gravity.

Ba'al was actually a bit sick at the sight of the cliff's edge. If he ever actually attempted to invade this planet, he'd have to remember to just bombard the city from orbit. Trying to mount a ground assault on Kweilin would be a nightmare, his Jaffa would have a hard-enough time just walking the streets without falling off the side of the mountain. The roads were barely wide enough for three men to stand abreast. No, better to bombard it from orbit and be done with it, he mused as he marveled at the resplendent beauty of the city around him.

When they reached the palace atop the spire Ba'al was once again impressed. The doors to Xiwangmu's fortress seemed to have been cut from two massive slabs of jade and carved into an elaborate depiction of some great battle from Lord Yu's conquests. Slaves must have labored on it for generations to make a carving that detailed. Ba'al was going to need to figure out something similarly impressive for his own fortress, his own decorations felt woefully spartan by comparison.

The doors swung open and his litter was carried past two formations of Jaffa in the formal uniforms of Imperial Guard of the Jade Emperor. Easily two hundred Jaffa stood on either side of the road, at attention and unmoving. His litter was carried as far as the foot of a tall staircase, then placed upon the ground. Win offered Ba'al his hand, helping the System Lord to his feet as he gave a few last-minute warnings on protocol. "This one has taken you as far as he may. This one does not have the right to travel any deeper into the palace. This one warns you, Lord Ba'al, that no one may stand taller than the Queen Mother of the West save the Jade Emperor. It would be viewed as a grave insult. Such things are not done."

Ba'al nodded, remembering Lord Yu's obsession for protocol. "I wish you well Win, may you have safe travels in solving your Mistress' riddle."

"We all have our place in the world, my Lord. Mine is to serve my Lady." Win bowed deeply, waiting for Ba'al to depart.

The System Lord dismissed the Jaffa, walking up the long staircase and into the palace. He passed through several antechambers worth of bureaucrats, couriers, courtiers, courtesans, and noblemen before finally reaching the throne room. He was unsurprised to find the space lined with yet more Jaffa in the armor of the Imperial Guard. Win's warning not to be higher than the Queen Mother was going to be easier to abide than the Jaffa might have implied. For though the Queen Mother herself was a waif of a woman, her throne had been elevated taller than even an Unas might stand comfortably. The Queen Mother's host was not old precisely, but she was more matronly than one might have expected. There were lines around her eyes and a whisper of grey about her hair that would have been enough for most Goa'uld to seek out a new host. Then again, she, like Ba'al, had been alive before the terms of peace.

"Come closer." She commanded, her voice sultry and stern. "I would see you Lord Ba'al."

"Lady Xiwangmu. I thank you for your indulgence, and your offer of safe passage." Ba'al replied, kneeling before the Goa'uld lady. "These are trying times and the old traditions are not upheld by all."

"I find that the old traditions are aided by some of the new ones." Lady Xiwangmu replied. "For example, while I am willing to offer you safe passage in exchange for the amount of Naquadah you promised, I am not willing to permit your departure until payment has been received in full."

"Is not my word sufficient, Lady Xiwangmu?" Ba'al smiled, pleased at the familiar exchange of mistrust, if she had accepted his offer without demanding something to that affect he would have known that she intended to kill him, laws of hospitality be damned.

"I find that one's word is as reliable as one's options." The Lady replied. "And I have been without company for too long, Lord Ba'al. You would not deprive an old Lady of entertainment so soon after arriving. We have not even had tea yet. I would be a poor host to invite you into my home and not even share a meal."

"I welcome your hospitality, but I will require the opportunity to communicate with my forces to get you what you desire." Ba'al replied.

"As I expected." The Lady Xiwangmu snapped her fingers twice and a servant appeared, seemingly popping out of the shadows from nowhere, and handed a long-range communication device to Ba'al. "This will be sufficient for you to send a transmission through the stargate once it has been activated, but we _will_ have tea first."

"If you insist." Ba'al replied, having consigned himself to the obsessive ritual of drinking tea while aboard Win's Ha'tak. It was not an altogether unpleasant cultural requirement.

Before the Lady Xiwangmu could summon her tea service, however, a young boy in a red-robe scurried into the room and dropped to the floor before the Goa'uld Queen, supplicating himself in total silence. The Queen of the West addressed the boy curtly, clearly furious at having been interrupted. "Why have you interrupted your queen, insolent boy – you are not so young as to avoid the punishment for such an insult. Why have you risked flogging for such impudence?"

"Forgiveness mistress but the head of the guard dispatched me to warn you. We have received a messenger." Replied the boy, his face still pressed against the tile as he replied.

"We have received a _System Lord_ foolish child." The Queen snarled. "A messenger can wait until their turn."

"It is a messenger from the Furlings, my Queen." The boy spoke in fearful reverence.

Ba'al's blood ran cold. The Furlings had not bothered to send a messenger in centuries, not to anyone. For one to arrive here, now, was an ill omen of things to come. His eyes met those of the Queen of the West and the two of them nodded to each other, needing no words to convey the severity of what this meant. Xiwangmu gestured next to her throne and Ba'al moved to the spot she indicated, facing the entrance he'd just come through. It served neither of them for Ba'al to be in a position of supplication when the Furling messenger arrived.

"I would receive him, provided that he agrees to abide by the laws of hospitality." Pronounced the Queen. The boy scurried away in an instant, never looking up from the floor. She hissed from between her teeth, though her master had been one of those least affected, she held no more love for the Furlings than Ba'al.

The Furling messenger trotted into the room, a goat-legged creature with the torso of a man and a shaggy face with curling ram-horns. He wore a simple linen tunic marked with golden oak leaves and carried a pan-pipe in one hand. His giddy expression couldn't help but feel caustically insulting.

He made a deep bow, given that his knees didn't quite bend the right way to kneel, and addressed the Queen of the West with his braying neigh of a voice. "I have come to bid you good tidings Queen Xiwangmu, and pass thee a message from Mine Queen and Mine Queen's sister."

"And what message would that be?" Queried Xiwangmu, her tone clipped and commanding.

"The courts of Winter and Summer have made a formal declaration of War on the God Chronos in alliance with the Lord Warden Dre'su'den, he who was Heka, heir of Sokar, God-King of Nekheb and ally of Fairy." Replied the furling. "Those who would wish to avoid our conflict need only cut ties with the traitor god Chronos."

The furling might as well have punched Ba'al in the face. Heka, the scourge of Djer's Lament, had allied himself with _both_ courts of Sun and Snow – _publicly_. To even chose to interact with them was unthinkable, to ally one's self with them unforgivable, for Heka it ought to have been _impossible_. But the one redeeming quality of the Furlings was their utter inability to speak that which was not true.

"Is that all?" Xiwangmu replied, her voice scrupulously absent of interest.

"No." Replied the Furling. "Due to the circumstances of Nekheb's King, the terms of your people's surrender will not be applied to him."

Ba'al blanched. What could Heka have _possibly_ offered the Queens of Sun and Snow? His stomach churned as a thought hit him. Perhaps a power great enough to _move a solar system_? He had interpreted Heka's self-imposed exile as an act of self-preservation given his unpopularity with everyone other than Ra himself, but what if it had been something different? Blood of Apep, Heka had effectively been unmonitored for two millennia, what devilry had he concocted in that time?

"He is _free_ of the terms?" Xiwangmu replied, a hit of some emotion Ba'al could not quite place in her tone. "Entirely?"

"Entirely." Replied the Furling. "The Queens of Winter and Summer shall not impose the terms upon him."

"And for those of us who are not participants in your war?" Queried the Queen.

"You many continue as you have done so since the terms were set." Replied the Furling. "The bargain remains. But know this, there are many who strayed from the terms, many more who seek to stray. The Queens do not forget what they are owed."

"I will not be threatened in my own home, Furling." The Queen's eyes flashed in fury.

"I do not threaten. I have no need to. It is fact." Replied the Furling. "But I have given my message, dost thou wish to reply to the Queens of Summer and Winter?"

"Yes, I would." Queen Xiwangmu nodded curtly. "Tell them that the Jade Kingdom abides by its word, but does not bow to threats. If the Queens wish to re-negotiate our terms I will not do so with a subordinate. I am the Queen Mother of the West, not some human cow to be frightened by a man with hooves and horns. I have no love for Chronos or whatever Heka has chosen to rename himself. The Jade Kingdom has no need of your war."

"Yes Queen Xiwangmu. I will convey your message." Replied the furling before it raised its fingers and snapped them, vanishing in a puff of smoke and fur.

The Queen Mother of the West glared at the spot where once the Furling had stood before addressing Lord Ba'al directly. "Lord Ba'al. I hope you will not be offended if I request that we delay our tea until _after_ you have send the message requesting that Naquadah. I suddenly find myself desiring an ampler supply. My Jaffa will see to activating the Stargate as you do so."

"Of course." Replied Ba'al as he activated the long-range communications device, the sheer magnitude of what had just happened playing through his mind. "I understand entirely."

The shape of galaxy had just changed, and the Furlings were marching to war. Blood of Apep, what had Heka done?


	2. Chapter 2

Atreus walked through the Stargate, followed by a cadre of the Lord Warden's Jaffa and mortal servants of the newly minted Lord of Nekheb. The Warden was beyond gracious as a host, having permitted him to take back a slain hydra as proof of his victories over the forces of Chronos as well as numerous lesser tokens of victory. Staff weapons and armor pilfered from the bodies of the Jaffa of Chronos, the putrefied skeletal remains of a vampire that died fighting alongside the Warden's forces, and any number of other spoils of war were being piled up upon the painted cart in front of the gate - the fifth such cart that he'd filled since returning from battle in glory and victory. He was grinning from ear to ear as his Jaffa marveled at the wonders he was bringing them, victories not seen since pantheon of Zeus first called for war against the Titans.

His own cadre of Spartan Guardsmen were actually struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of it, and he was grateful that the Lord Warden had allowed so many of his inner guard to accompany him home. There was a pleasant dichotomy to seeing warriors in the heavy red armor of those formerly in service to Sokar's pantheon engaging in mundanities with the Spartan Jaffa of Pelops. They were laughing with each other, joking even. Some of them were even bartering over blades and baubles that they'd brought to trade.

There was a startling visual difference between the two armies. Pelops, having no particular reason to fear the Furlings seeking retribution upon him, armored his Jaffa in a manner more practical to allow freedom of movement and efficacious combat with the long spears favored by the Spartan Guardsmen. They were a defensive army to slay the Jaffa of rival nations, not the entrenched armies of a terrified god cowering from the forces of Summer and Winter. The Hellenic pantheons did not cower.

They conquered.

Even his father would have to concede that such a victory was worthy of praise. Perhaps it was not enough to redeem Atreus in the eyes of his father, but it might be enough that he would no longer be considered a pariah in the pantheons of Pelops. The decision to send Atreus to Sokar's meeting had been a deliberate insult. Pelops had no intention of subordinating himself to the Flacon's Cry, but he could not outright ignore the man's summons without his act being interpreted as a tacit declaration of deliberate alliance with Sokar's enemies. He could, however, send his banished heir.

Atreus wasn't entirely certain if it had been his father's intention for him to die on Sokar's world. His father would lament his passing, perhaps even fight a war of vengeance in his name, but Atreus' progenitor had been unwilling to tolerate the presence of his remaining son in the millennia since the deaths of Thyestes and Chrysippus. In truth it was only the death of Chrysippus that staved off Atreus' bitterness – he had only his own weakness of character to blame for his current lot in life. Pelops had doted upon his bastard son Chrysippus, as had his brothers. He had been a good boy. He was not born of the Goa'uld, a Tau'ri sired through the genetic material of Pelops' host body, but Pelops had decided to treat the child no different than any other sired of his blood. Atrues and Thyestes had both enjoyed the child's company, his wide eyed innocence and uncompromising love for his siblings rewarded as best they were able given their own limited ability to interact with a being so limited.

When his tutor, Theban Laius, had transpired to be Ashrak in service to the slain god Myrtilus it had ended in the boy's doom. His tutor had worse than killed him. The young boy, shamed by his violation, had been unable to cope with facing his divine siblings after having been dishonored. He feared that they might tell their father what had been done to him and that Pelops might disown him for his shame. The boy fell upon his blade in shame, refusing to let such a thing happen. His brothers, unwilling to let their brother go, resurrected him in the sarcophagus – only for the boy to end himself again and again as his brothers tried to help him come to terms with the violation that had been inflicted upon him. It had taken many tries before their little brother accepted that they had no intention of telling their father. They were of the blood of Pelops, they wouldn't shame their brother in the eyes of their father. Not before he'd brought down doom upon those who would shame the house. They led their brother on a crusade of revenge, bringing doom upon Theban Lauis, his family, and any cities that housed him, but vengeance was not enough to purge the boy's demons.

It was then suggested by Thestes that perhaps doing something for their father would cure Chrysippus of his terror. He had no reason to fear their father if he'd done something for him. So, they saw fit to assist him in engineering the sabotage of several rival gods in a test of skill. Pelops won, and Crysippus, in a moment of blind hope, told his father what he'd done to ensure his father's victory. It had been an error. Pelops' love for his son had been lesser than that of the boy's brothers. He cast the child off a high cliff for having had the arrogance to imply that a god could not win without the aid of a mortal child.

Atreus and Thyestes had then been tasked with recovering their brother from the ground below so that Pelops could torture the boy into insanity for his insolence but neither of the living sons could bring themselves to bring more pain upon their brother. Not when he had already suffered so much. They spirited away the child's body, casting it down a well deep enough to defy Goa'uld scanning technology and denying that they'd ever been able to find the body when their father asked. The rage of Pelops had been terrible, but not so terrible as the sorrow of Thyestes. His brother had found comfort in the flesh of Atreus' own mortal queen Areope – a crime for which Atreus could not forgive him.

After selling his wife into slavery for her transgression, Atreus butchered the mortal sons of Thyestes. He ordered his Jaffa to chop up their bodies and slaves to roast them as part of a great feast so that his Goa'uld brother could feel the betrayal that Atreus felt had been perpetuated upon him by his sibling. He fed their roasted corpses to Thyestes and his wife, grinning all the while knowing that the belly of Thyestes would destroy anything large enough to resurrect in his belly. He'd intended to hold onto the information of what he'd done to his brother till the time when he was able to engineer his brother's downfall, but fate saw to intervene.

He didn't know which of his servants started the tale of what had happened before his Jaffa slaughtered the cooks involved, but it had been sufficient for his vengeance to catch the ear of the Oracle. The damnable oracle spawned by Thoth and Heka set his brother against him, feeding him a spell of awful portent and hideous provenance. She poisoned Thyestes' mind, teaching him rituals to empower an assassin to slay Atreus and their father. Thyestes used his remaining mortal daughter's body as a vessel for the ritual, planting his seed within her to produce a monster capable of felling a god against her will. Though Pelopia did not know her father was the man who'd done it because of the mask he'd used to hide his face, she recognized the armor and blade of Thestes' guardsmen. As women are wont to do, she fled her father's household, unwilling to live under the roof of her attacker – though she kept the attacker's blade so that she might one day slay the man with it.

So it was, that when she hid with the mortal King Thesprotus, Atreus met her thinking she was one of the mortal King's daughters. She was beautiful and unknown to Atreus, so he purchased her from the man who pretended to be her father. He was not normally the sort to buy a woman already fat with child, but there was an aura to her that he couldn't resist – the magics used to spawn the monster within her. She birthed the boy, using a goat to suckle the bastard product to incest rather that allowing the thing to touch her. Atreus raised the boy, trying to treat him with the kindness that Pelops had not used with Chrysippius. He trained the child in the art of war, eventually raising the boy to even be his first prime. It was that which ultimately brought about disaster.

The thrice damned Oracle chose the day of Aegisthus implantation ritual and ascension to First Prime of Atreus to inform Pelopia of her rapist's identity. Pelopia fell upon Thyestes' blade in shame, horrified at what had been done to her by her own father. Atreus, remembering his brother's pain, chose not to resurrect his mortal wife when his adopted son came to him with the blood-soaked blade in tears in his eyes. Unaware of the Oracle's tampering, Atreus sent the boy to slay Thyestes with his own blade – believing that Thyestes had ordered Atreus' wife slain. Atreus still did not know by what magics Aegisthus had been ensorcelled, but the rituals used in the boy's creation had rendered him impotent to the combined machinations of Thyestes and the Oracle. They corrupted the Jaffa's mind, overcoming the love Aegisthus felt for Atreus and corrupting him into their own weapon.

He'd not realized that Aegisthus had slain him until he'd awoken in the sarcophagus at the heart of Pelop's fortress. Pelops had been monitoring the interaction between his full blood sons, and he was not amused. He cast Atreus from the First World, banishing him to the outer reaches of Pelop's territory. Thyestes was not so lucky. For collaborating with the Oracle, one of the engineers of Winter's Peace, Thyestes had been given to Hades himself for punishment. Lord Hades did not take kindly to the magics employed by Atreus' brother – though Atreus feared that a similar nightmare awaited him in Hades' realm when he finally descended into death.

It was some small comfort that his mortal sons and daughter had managed to flee to the ancient Greek city of Sparta before Thyestes had been able to capture them. They were undeserving of the vengeance that had grown between the bloodline of Atreus. Pelops had been at least merciful enough not to slay them to even out his crimes against the children of Thestes. But he had remained to rot at the edge of known space, without glory or conquest to redeem himself. Pelops had spent millennia relegating Atreus to a glorified functionary to humiliate him, pining for some chance, any chance, at glory and battle so that he might win back his father's respect. Perhaps even his love, though Atreus knew in his heart that Pelops had never taken the lesson of Chrysippus' kindness to be what it was – a sign of Tau'ri strength of will.

The first prime of the Warden turned to Atreus as the last of the Goa'uld's trophies breached the rim of the gate's portal. "My Lord Atreus, shall I relay a message to mine own Lord Warden for you."

"Only my gratitude, First Prime Ul'tak. Only my gratitude." Atreus' lip quirked up, he found himself greatly enjoying the company of the Lord Warden's first prime. The Jaffa was exactly what he would have expected from someone who'd catered to Heka's madness and kept the kingdom running for centuries in spite of it. He was polite but wary, obedient but always looking for an opportunity to do good in spite of his Lord's madness. The only Jaffa capable of surviving as first prime for the maddest of the Goa'uld were those clever enough or violent enough to meet the needs of their Goa'uld masters. Ul'tak lacked the edge of cruelty for Atreus to believe it was the latter.

Based off of the First Prime's utter relaxation in the presence of the Lord Warden, however, it was readily apparent that he no longer served his former master. The Lord Warden insisted that he was not Heka, and Atreus was willing to take him at his word if only because the Queen of Winter had willingly addressed him by his new name and title. If she did not believe them to be true, she would not have spoken them. So either Heka had assumed a new mantle that consumed his previous being entirely or, more likely, one of his lieutenants had learned enough about Heka's magics to take control of his empire without alerting Sokar of the change in power. Such things were not common, especially for a Goa'uld as old and capable as Heka had been, but all empires must fall eventually.

Heka's presumed replacement was an utter madman, but an entertaining one. Atreus recognized the mania of him, it was the same mania that Heracles, the first prime of Zeus, held in his heart. There was a wild abandon to the man, an obsessive subservience to a code of behavior that he'd not bothered to share with the rest of the world around him prior to imposing punishments for having violated it upon on all those he encountered. Atreus grinned at the memory of the recalcitrant Jaffa warrior wrestling a befuddled Goa'uld to the ground, pinning him down in spite of the strength of the Goa'uld's Unas host body at the last great gathering of the Hellenic Pantheons.

He ran his fingers over the corpse of the hydra, patting the rough skin of the deceased monster lovingly at the thought of _finally_ being allowed to re-enter society. "I should be asking _you_ what you desire, warrior Ul'tak. For the glories that you've earned in battle against the forces of Chronos mine own father might well grant you the blessings of a demigod."

"I am merely here to serve." Replied Ul'tak, though there was a hitch in the Jaffa's speech that no amount of practice in serving the Goa'uld could conceal. Pelops was the spiritual father of all Jaffa, the one who'd first created the process of implantation. He had also refined in _greatly_ in the time since he'd first shared it with all Goa'uld. It was known that the Jaffa of Pelops were stronger, faster, and longer lived than the Jaffa of other pantheons – but the truth of the matter far outstripped even the wildest of Jaffa rumors. Between genetic manipulation and the judicious application of nancytes, Pelops was capable of making the Jaffa functionally immortal. Ul'tak loved his new Lord, but he held the same desperate need for glory that Pelops had been judicious in implanting within the psyche of Jaffa warriors.

Atreus smiled at the longing Ul'tak tried to conceal. The Jaffa wouldn't accept the offer, but it would gnaw at him. He might even speak of it to his confidants within the power structure of Heka, perhaps even reaching one of them far enough from the blood rituals of Heka to be able to seek power without fear of magical prohibition on treason. Atreus replied to the Jaffa's modesty with a deferential bow, pulling the helmet from his head. "You humble me, First Prime Ul'tak."

The Jaffa replied by pounding his fist over his heart in salute. "Kree Remoc, Lord Atreus. Tal'ma'te."

"Tal'ma'te Ul'tak." Replied Atreus as the Jaffa warriors of Nekheb activated the stargate and returned to their world to start the long work of rebuilding their burned and broken nation. He was sad to see them go really, it was unlikely that they would ever meet again except on the field of battle. Such was the way of the Goa'uld.

Atreus massaged his shoulder, feeling at the flesh behind his right shoulder. By all rights he should be exhausted. He'd been awake for two straight days, and in constant battle for most of that time. But he felt none of the pain or exhaustion that he should have. No, from the moment he first sipped from his goblet at the Lord Warden's feast of coronation all the pain had left him. Wounds that he _knew_ he'd sustained in battle were gone, leaving not even the trace of a scar upon his flesh. He was as alert and awake as if he'd slept for days. He would have thought that it was the work of Dionysus had he not laid eyes upon the pillar of flames who'd taken credit for catering the event. The Lord Warden most _definitely_ knew how to throw a proper bacchanal. If the population of Nekheb didn't suddenly spike in the next nine months Atreus would eat his sandals.

"He was a worthy warrior?" Queried the stern voice of a Jaffa next to him, a tall man of seeming middle age though Atreus knew him to be at least eighty. His face was marked by a long scar up the left cheek and a milky white eye that seemed to be blinded by that same injury but was, in reality, a complex prosthetic of Goa'uld make.

"He is. Very worthy." Replied Atreus, turning to his first prime and smiling. "I half expected you to challenge him to combat just on principle."

"First blood maybe." Paulus replied, smiling back at his Lord and Master. "Don't want to be rude to a guest. But no, my Lord, I would not. He is tired from battle and there is no glory in taking advantage of another man's weakness – not when he has fought as an ally so recently. And not when there might be a chance to do so honorably."

"And what chance do you refer to?" Atreus queried as he waved his hand across the device upon his wrist, activating a subterranean ring transporter and teleporting the two of them back to his fortress. His first prime didn't even blink at the change in scenery as they appeared within Atreus' palace.

"The Olympic games of course my Lord." Paulus grinned.

"Ah, yes the games." The pantheon Zeus and his Olympian Guard Jaffa held a loose alliance with the pantheon of Pelops and his Spartan Jaffa Armies, if only out of tradition and respect for their mutual roles in the war of Thoth's Folly. The Olympic games, held at regular intervals on the world of Olympus, were the height of Hellenic Goa'uld society. "You think that Zeus will extend an invitation to the Lord Warden?"

"He did to the Brahma and the Jaffa of Olokun after their victories against Chronos and the forces of Nekheb have dealt the Titan an embarrassing defeat – with your help, of course, my Lord." The Jaffa hastily added, eager not to diminish Atreus' victories.

"I understand your meaning Paulus." Atreus replied, sitting down upon the stairs leading from his temple and looking out at the sprawling metropolis of his capitol city. Creeping ivy covered pastel painted plaster buildings built into the white stone cliffs overlooking the opalescent blue seas. He watched the little shapes of boats bobbing as sailors and fisherman plied their trades. "They fought bravely, giving them credit for their bravery is no disservice to my own. They fought horrors not seen since the final battle of Djer's Lament. You're right, Zeus will likely recognize their bravery."

"Will he accept Zeus' invitation?" Paulus asked, his voice hopeful. "I would very much like to test my skills against those of one who fought the Unspeakable."

'Fought' was an overly congratulatory term for Ul'tak's mad scramble to beg at the hem of the Lord Warden's skirts when the Shoggoth had appeared but there was some measure of debt owed to the First Prime of Dre'su'den. Atreus would not be the one to undermine Ul'tak's honor, not while there remained the possibility of alliance between himself and the Lord Warden. Atreus spoke. "There is much that I do not know of how the Lord Warden thinks, but it would be impractical for him to deny the invitation."

It would be _blisteringly_ stupid actually. The Hellenic pantheons hadn't ever particularly needed much of a reason to go to war with the Titans, and the Lord Warden was effectively handing them a way of exceeding the strategic arms limitations with the tacit blessings of their Furling oppressors. Really the greatest danger in attending the Olympics would be in navigating the sexual advances of both Athena and Aphrodite – Hera too more than likely, though actually pursuing her would be tantamount to suicide. His cousins were drawn to powerful men, Athena seeking her equal and Aphrodite just always seeking.

He snorted in a way that was probably less than god-like at the thought of it. The Lord Warden had seemed uncomfortable enough around his own priestesses, unleashing Aphrodite upon him might well break him. "Oh, I really do hope that father allows me to attend. Watching that would be actually _worth_ listening to Hermes complain endlessly about how hard it is to coordinate the Games."

"I will endeavor to impress." Replied his First Prime, clearly still thinking that Atreus was referring to Paulus' intended competition with UI'tak. The Jaffa were really quite myopic at times.

But then, who was Atreus to ruin Paulus' moment? The man had spent as much time ostracized from the society of Spartan Jaffa by virtue of serving Atreus as Atreus had spent ostracized from the other Goa'uld. He deserved a something to look forward to. "Paulus, if the time comes, _when_ the time comes, I know you will do me proud."

He looked out across the city and watched the tiny shapes of wagons moving from the gate in the direction of civilization. Today had been really a remarkably good day.


	3. Chapter 3

Apophis was the Lord of Hell. Unfortunately, he was currently one of seven different gods who could lay at least a partially legitimate claim to that title at the moment. The six month long bloody gauntlet of would be lords of hell had reduced the number of potential Lords of Hell from thirty, one by one.

The eighth individual who might have once been able to claim that title sat chained upon the ground before Apophis, broken and bloodied. He was bound so tightly that he could barely breathe, let alone move, and the gag shoved in his mouth just barely quelled the terrified screams. The "god" of water and rivers knew what was coming.

Apophis kicked the "god" before him, breaking his nose with the iron capped toe of his black armor. "Potrimpo you have never been a god of any particular standing. You were born too late to have ever tasted true power in anything but borrowed memories of your progenitor. You think in mortal terms and fight by mortal rules."

He reached down to grab the "god," lifting him by the front of his brocaded vest. The Potrimpo's eyes bulged, the rippling motion beneath his neck a sign of how desperately the symbiote was trying to flee the host body. Apophis grinned, knowing what Potrimpos did not – escape was impossible. Apophis was only a shadow of his former self, but he could _force_ the gods to remain within the limits of their flesh. He was a god of endlings and chaos, the doom of those who strayed from the Rules of the Pantheon of Apep.

 _Keeping_ his prey in place till the end came was a privilege for which even Winter would not rob him. "You would presume to rule over one who once spoke to the Queens of Sun and Snow as their Equal? I who remember the names of the _Nameless and Discarded_ who would not live by the terms and were banished beyond the Gates – beyond Duat to the Great Nightmare?"

Apophis raised his blade, willing it to shimmer with the arcane light of chaos – particles of matter turning to energy and energy turning to motes of matter in a coruscating pattern that tore through the veil of mortality. No spell or enchantment could withstand such a blade, it would render the flesh of moral and immortal alike. The lesser god's eyes bulged with horror as he watched the light flickering along the blade – knowing what was to come.

Apophis' eyes flashed greedily, casting light into flickering darkness of the Throne Room of the Necropolis. "I do not play with the toys of those who came before me, I _forged_ the Empire whose moldering bones you pick through – thinking yourself a king."

He cut off the lesser god's right leg with a clean sweep of his blade, leaning in to whisper in the thrashing god's ear. "You are going to die here today."

He sliced off the left leg, still holding the thrashing godling in his vice-like grip. "You are going to die because you are pathetic, and weak."

He sliced the god's bindings, dropping the bleeding paraplegic upon the ground. He struggled to flee Apophis, dragging his bleeding stump away from the God of Serpents. The water god left long rivers of blood behind him as he hefted his carcass along the cold, stone floor.

Apophis followed behind him, flensing his back inch by inch, near giddy with joy at the screams that even the gag in Potrimpo's mouth could not muffle. "You are not going to be one of my Lieutenants – you are not worthy of licking my boots, let alone joining my pantheon."

Apophis cut off the water god's right arm, forcing the man to limply flail across the floor with his remaining appendage. He kicked the severed arm ahead of Potrimpo and into a flaming brazier to sizzle with a sickeningly delicious odor of roasting pork, cackling in amusement. "You can't even run away properly."

Potrimpo raised his arm in a vain gesture of warding as Apophis drove his blade through the man's remaining arm and into his skull, taking care to cut deep enough to kill the host but not to cut down far enough to strike the symbiotic wrapped around the man's spine. He released the spell binding the symbiote to the host, freeing the panicked and agonized serpent.

The pitiable, mewling, little worm wriggled out from the host's spit skull, thrusting out from the broken bits of brain matter and slapping on the blood-soaked stone. Near-blind and panicked, it tried to flee only to have Apophis grasp it in his lighting quick gauntleted fingers. He held up aloft the serpent, the hooked barbs along his kara-kesh keeping the writhing snake trapped against the glowing foci as he mentally willed the built in pain-giver to life.

The high-pitched squeals of the serpent echoed through the shadowy expanse of the throne room, tinny little screeches of abject horror as the device forced agony into every fiber of the Goa'uld's body. It was a horrific device from Sokar's private collection of ritual artefacts, a Kara'kesh made with the specific intention of wounding both body and soul irreparably.

Shimmering lights flashed from along the shadowed recesses of the Throne room, the eyes of his budding pantheon unable to conceal their horror and excitement at what they were watching as Apophis lifted his would-be rival's neck up to his lips and bit down, tearing through the flesh and bone as Potrimpo howled.

There was a moment of utter silence except for the sounds of wet chewing as Apophis devoured every scrap of his rival. Under the normal rules of warfare, Apophis would have likely tortured Potrimpo into submission – forcing him to become a subordinate in his pantheon and eventually giving Potrimpo the chance for wealth and holding in exchange for service. But these were not normal times, and Apophis could not rely upon the old customs to hold sway. He had to quell any dissent within his ranks until he could be more confident of his long term stability as ruler of Delmak.

Delmak had devolved into total civil war in the days following Sokar's demise. With no clear recipient of Sokar's mantle to control the ancient spells and protections placed upon his deep places, there was no way to tell if the sudden release of horrors from the great undercity below the necropolis was intentional or a byproduct of a total loss of control in the millennia of carefully laid rituals and devices to keep them beneath.

When the traitorous bastard Rostam destroyed the great Southern Fortress from orbit, he had done so with the scrupulous intention of destroying the planetary warding structure protecting the denizens of the Delmak's surface by rupturing one of Sokar's largest artificially created leylines. Netu had just been _one_ prison in Sokar's empire, and the prison hidden deep beneath Delmak's earth and stone incarcerated beasts more dangerous than Netu could ever have hoped to contain.

Prismatic storms of energy were still ravaging the southern continent, but that was a concern infinitely subordinate to the sudden influx of angry and hungering beasts. Monsters from before the Folly of Thoth preyed upon what parts of the population weren't active participants in the ongoing war for dominance, making Delmak into a greater hell than Netu had ever been able to match. Apophis had been forced to wet his blade with the blood of ancient enemies taken as prisoners of war battles for the first world by Sokar, vampires and demons Apophis believed relics of a past long forgotten.

He'd slain three Mayan Elders with tattoos and Bones marking them as ancient enough to perhaps have been among the first gifted with the red thirst by their Omeyocan allies. A pox on Coatlicue and her entire pantheon for having been monsters of such abhorrent violence that their people were willing to inflict the "gifts" of the Omeyocan upon themselves – the entire twice cursed brood had deserved worse than the doom the combined might of the Pantheons and Furlings had done to them as part of their banishment after the death of Coyolxauhqui and the discovery of their treachery in the early days of Thoth's Folly.

Apophis _might_ have been able to stage a clean coup if he'd reached the Imperial Palace of Delmak's Necropolis immediately after the destruction of Netu. The Lord of the Flames, his primary rival for the throne, was physically imposing but frankly a bit of an idiot. The Gatekeeper of the Necropolis relied upon his physical stature and skill in combat to overwhelm any opponent that might challenge him, but he was too myopic to have any degree of skill for deception.

If he was going to kill Apophis following the immediate death of his "father," he would have come at the head of a great army and challenged him to single combat – it was the way of him. He wanted to dominate his foes in public, earn the love of his Jaffa. As though grappling like some mortal slave made him more of a proper god, it was pathetic.

If he actually fought Apophis in single combat, Apophis was entirely certain that he would loose to the more physically and magically adept warrior. What of his power remained could not be directed to an immediate conflict – Ra had been sure to impose that upon him when he subordinated Apophis' role within the pantheon as part of Heka's terms. The abilities to empower ritual objects, bless his followers, and bewitch the will of mortal heretics, would prove to be of little use in combat.

Which, of course, is why he had no intention of fighting Aziel in the event that the Lord of the Flames issued a challenge to single combat. Orbital bombardment of the appointed meeting ground would be more than sufficient to scourge any remnant of Aziel large enough to resurrect via sarcophagus. Apophis could hardly be faulted for choosing a weapon more effective than that of his opponent. Anyone foolish enough to do so would find themselves suffering a similar fate. When one's detractors were all dead, one hardly needed to worry about their opinions.

Heka, or more appropriately whatever sub-lieutenant finally got the better of Heka and assumed his throne, had demolished any chance at immediate supremacy over Sokar's realm Apophis might have hoped to achieve. In a display of physical prowess that more or less entirely precluded the man from potentially being Apophis' brother, the self-appointed "Lord Warden" had bested Aziel's personal army, defeated the Lord of Flames in single-combat, and escaped in a display so public that no degree of propaganda could quell the truth of it.

He'd then had the audacity to free the Pantheon Sokar had been attempting to build. Liberating them from Delmak's surface without forcing them to pledge loyalty or military aide to any of the factions warring for Delmak, freeing a substantial portion of the planet's civilian population, and stealing several entire _fleets_ previously in service to Sokar. It would have been impressive, even amusing, were it not so totally at odds with Apophis' own goals for the immediate future.

It was especially infuriating given that the Lord Warden was presumably of Apep's direct line, like Ra and Apophis had been. He couldn't imagine Ammit tolerating subordinating herself anyone external to the family for any substantial length of time – not after spending millennia stranded on the First World after she was betrayed when the Egyptian gate fell.

Yes, family indeed.

The man was doubtless from Heka's direct gene pool given how much blood magic would be necessary to maintain control over even a fraction of Nekheb's wards. To be so entirely outmaneuvered by his nephew was infuriating, though not so infuriating as the possibility that Heka managed to secure a Queen willing to tolerate him long enough to breed. His distasteful attitude to women, especially chattel, had been unfitting of Apep's true bloodline.

It was nice to have a rival who at least had the common decency to be of correct breeding. Ra and Apophis had hated each other for most of creation, but they'd both understood each other. They shared the same genetic memories upon which they'd formed their own kingdoms. They didn't need to like each other to achieve their mutual goals and roles in the ancient Pantheon's war against the Great Enemy. To match one's wits against an equal in battle was a glory second to none.

But it was a glory he would not experience in the immediate. While Apophis did control the central parts of Delmak's capitol and a majority of the fleets formerly controlled by Sokar thanks to the work of his Serpent Guard, he lacked sufficient military leverage to assert total dominance. Aziel, wary of a second defeat and disgrace, had elected _not_ to challenge Apophis to single combat but was instead waging and infuriatingly effective military campaign for control of Sokar's holdings.

Which would have been bad enough in and of itself, but Aziel was not the only Goa'uld of Sokar's pantheon with aspirations of conquest. The other System Lords from the Hellenic and Titan Pantheons, had, as of yet, made limited seizures of Sokar's former outlying holdings – Chronos was too busy warring upon the Lord Warden to make any serious effort to invade and the Hellenic gods lacked sufficient fleets to wage an offensive war so far from the homeland. But it was only a matter of time before they turned their aspirations towards the Great Lands of the Necropolis.

Apophis had no proof of it, but he was convinced that somehow the Tau'ri were responsible for this. How they would have managed quite so intricate a web of catastrophes upon him while languishing upon the surface of Netu was beyond even his divine providence, but Apophis was more convinced of O'Neill's hand in this chaos than he'd ever been of anything in his entire life. He swallowed the last wriggling bit of the sybiote, biting through the creature's brain and finally putting it out of his misery as he smacked his lips, snapping his fingers to summon his new first prime.

The Jaffa warrior, a necropolis guard who normally had a proper stomach for violence, seemed a bit green in the gills as he approached Apophis with his head bowed in deference. "My Lord Apophis."

"Have you located Nekheb yet?" Apophis rumbled, the fury in his voice tempered by the glow of his recent victory. He licked the metal tipped fingers of his Kara'kesh gauntlet, making sure to get every bit of flavor from his defeated foe.

"No my Lord Apophis," The Jaffa bowed deeper. "We have sent fleets through the spaces where your divine guidance suggested Nekheb might have been relocated after the Warden stole it from the stars. There were several populated worlds and one world rich for mining, but no signs of the Warden's stronghold. Though they wage war against him, our spies in the kingdoms of Chronos and Moloch have yielded little insight. Please forgive me, my Lord. The Lord Warden has enacted some great devilry beyond the ability of a mere Jaffa."

Apophis' eyes flared with anger, but not at the Jaffa. It was the situation that angered him – The Lord Warden had not moved the star system. Apophis was certain of that. The confluence of events required for even a god unburdened by the Heka's terms to move that many moving objects within that great of an area would have been impossible to conceal – it would have required ripping a sizable rip in the very fabric of reality.

Assuming that it didn't just consume the system as it imploded into that tear, it would leave a number of exotic particles that could be tracked and mapped to find where the matter had been moved. But as there wasn't a horrific wound in the fabric of existence and the radiation permeating the emptiness where Nekheb out to have been, Apophis was left to conclude that someone had taken the system elsewhere without moving it through realspace.

Given the Lord Warden's overt and declared allegiance with the Furlings, it seemed likely that the Queens of Sun and Snow were responsible for this irregularity. Moving an entire star system to where it ought not be was precisely the sort of prank that overjoyed the Furlings.

He would not be bested by them – not again. And, no matter how tempting it might have been, he was not going to murder his newly minted First Prime for having failed to out-think the Furlings. Pelops most certainly hadn't bred them for their capacity for critical thinking or creative problem solving. It was a poor carpenter who blamed the hammer for not being a saw.

While troops sent by the Stargate provided no reasonable marker by which one could measure distance, there was a limit to how far and how fast a ship could travel via hyperdrive. This was especially true when one was trying to establish lines of defense and supply. Armies needed to be able to fall back and advance forward incrementally, providing flexibility to one's structure but creating an unavoidable degree of predictability of movement.

Given the location of the battle lines between Chronos, Moloch, and the Warden, there was a limited supply of potential empty regions of space for the system to have been placed. Several _thousand_ but still fewer than the width and breadth of an entire galaxy as the Jaffa seemed to fear."Continue to search the locations provided. One of them will be Nekheb."

"Yes, my Lord. I will do as you command." Replied the Jaffa, bowing and departing the throne room backwards, his voice marked by a clear tone of panic beyond his ability to suppress.

Apophis pinched at the bridge of his nose, counting back from ten as his eye twitched. He reminded himself how impossible his search had to seem to the Jaffa, how much of a drain on Apophis' battle plans the exploratory fleet truly was. His First Prime would have been insane not to have doubts, not while their position of power was so precarious.

Apophis conceded that having the three fleets back at Delmak would greatly secure his claim to the system. But he couldn't afford to let Heka's murderer disappear into the woodwork. The Lord Warden had a claim to the Throne of Hell – unless he subordinated himself to Apophis and revoked his claim Apophis would eventually have no choice but to take it by force as there would always be elements within the Necropolis Guard and the Cult of Sokar who would be sympathetic to the Warden.

Many would pray to their "true" god rather than to Apophis. How many, he could not say but Apophis was not a divisive figure in Delmak's current Patheon. The Warden, in spite of the best efforts of Apophis' clergy to stymie the spread of the Warden's cancerous gospel, was much beloved even by those who cursed his name. By the time Apophis realized the Warden's stories were in the ears of his people, the Warden's gospels had already reached a unique narrative niche of lovable antagonist that was impossible to discard.

The Mad God of Magic who carried his naughtiest thoughts in his own disembodied skull, pulled out of his head by the evil Queen of Winter so that he might have someone of equal madness to talk with. It could be told as a heroic epic, a tale of warning, a parable of danger, and a thousand other things that made simply forbidding the population from retelling it next to impossible short of genocide. Given the wartime population adjustment, genocide seemed an ineffective solution in any timeframe capable of meeting Apophis' needs.

The Warden was conquering the people's hearts without ever stepping foot upon Delmak. Apophis would not live in another man's kingdom.


	4. Chapter 4

**HUGE FUCKOFF TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER**

Disclaimer: The following scene is potentially disturbing on a visceral level. I felt sick reading it, and I wrote it. This is a supplemental chapter from one of my more detestable villain's point of view. He is loathsome and written to be loathsome. I feel that this informs the character of Moloch, but **you should not read this** if you're in any way horrified by **mutilation, death, cannibalism, necromancy,** or any one of a hundred horrific things this bastard does. You are not obligated to read this to understand my plot. "Moloch is an evil bastard" probably gives you the TLDR version of this.

Even if you're ok reading those topics **I would highly advise having mental aftercare prepared.** Youtube videos of puppies, some of those uplifting videos that give you hope for humanity. Dogs meeting their owners after the come back from deployment or something like that.

I'm not fucking around with this. I don't believe in trigger warnings even conceptually and I'm choosing to put one in my chapter. This chapter is a **horror** story. It is not light hearted. Moloch is not redeemable. Moloch is not someone you with empathize with. Reading this chapter **will** make you feel dirty.

If at any time this chapter exceeds your comfort level, **stop reading**. It only gets **_worse_ **as the chapter goes on. While this does not exceed the content requirements of the M rating, I feel that it is necessary to give readers who are not mentally prepared for the horrors to come adequate opportunity to not read this chapter.

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 **Seriously you're not obligated to read this. I'm not joking, this chapter is fucked.**

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 **You've been given plenty of chances to opt out of you don't want to see this. It's supplementary and you're under no obligation to finish it if, and when you want to tap out. I strongly encourage readers who actually want to read this to have mental aftercare prepared as an intellectual palette cleanser.**

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 **Ok, don't say I didn't warn you. Like legit, I don't believe in the idea of Trigger Warnings and I'm giving you one. Read at your own peril.**

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 **Please understand that Moloch is a villain. His POV is loathsome and is intended to be loathsome. You are under NO OBLIGATION to finish this chapter. **

* * *

Moloch wiped the grease from his lips with bread rather than with his napkin. The feast was always a messy one, but one he indulged in rarely enough that he wasn't willing to waste any of it. Slow roasting gave it a great deal of additional flavor that one couldn't hope to achieve by conventional means of cooking. The combination of low heat applied for long periods of time, paired with the centuries of culinary expertise honed by the Goa'uld noble appointed to the role of head chef, allowed for a meal truly fit for the gods.

Livestock wailed piteously as they were butchered for the feast in the traditional manner. The cooks took them apart joint by joint, healed the cuts with a hand device to prolong the process, and left the head for last to ensure the proper freshness of the meat – plucking out the tongue and eyes last.

It was common knowledge among Moloch's court that a necessary part of the butchering process was flavoring the through pain, so his butcher had mastered the process of prolonging the suffering of his charges. The livestock was clever enough to recognize their eventual fates, and fought against the butcher's Jaffa assistants with all their might, squealing and fighting with all four limbs as the trussed-up beasts were dragged out from the holding pens. Their eyes darted around the room in all too comprehending horror, squealing and screaming from behind their leather muzzles.

There had been some early efforts to determine a more humane way of slaughtering the livestock, but it was ultimately decided that the benefit to the animals was subordinate to the needs of those feeding upon them. Ultimately what did it matter if one's food died in agony or in ecstasy, one fed upon them all the same. It was not the role of a god to fret over the condition of his meal prior to a butcher's knife.

And what glorious work had the chef done! The soup made from tripe and hominy alone was worth the momentary discomfort of hearing the wailing cries. The intestine crunched between his molars, the squelching mix of firmness and buttery softness playing across his palette as the spiced broth warmed his belly. He spread the paste rendered from cold cuts of tongue across a slice of unleavened bread, doing his best to evenly divide the chunks of mushrooms, cheese, nuts and prunes along it before drizzling honey atop it and biting into the concoction.

His wide grin and smiling eyes were met by proud gaze of the head chef and butcher, the two Goa'uld sublords gleeful that they'd met Lord Moloch's high expectations. He'd had them in his employ since before he'd settled in Canaan, back in the times before the terms. They'd stayed loyal through the worst of times. Unlike most of the squabbling Goa'uld rabble, Moloch's pantheon was full of god's united through blood and fire. Loyalty, loyalty was important above all else.

The great hall of his throne room was filled with the sounds of revelry and merriment as his Jaffa lieutenants and Goa'uld subordinates all met to break bread and share in his glory. Moloch sat at the highest point of the highest table with the other, lesser, Goa'uld so that he could observe the Jaffa warriors as they supped. He'd not had a revelry so glorious since he'd first been impressed into the service of Sokar to escape the coming armies of Ba'al.

Sokar had found Moloch's revelries to be distasteful – unfitting of the gods. Sokar's distaste for a proper celebration had been a matter of constant frustration, given that it was the festivities upon which Moloch relied to keep good order and discipline. He had been an infuriating teetotaler, eschewing personal pleasure under the misinformed auspices of denying enemies the opportunity to take advantage of him. In order for Moloch to receive Sokar's protection, Moloch had been forced to forsake the many of his favorite traditions. Save passing supplicants into the flames, of course, even Sokar had not been able to take that from him.

Some things were truly sacred.

But now that Sokar was dead, he was under no obligation to abstain. Everything upon which they supped was taken in battle, glorious tokens of conquest. Heaping platters of roasted meats, pies, pasties, vegetables, and cakes stood as a testament to the prowess of Moloch's faithful. His Jaffa were raucous in their celebration, hands stained with the same rich juices as their god. They supped upon the food of the gods, glorious and victorious.

Moloch bit down, chewing wetly as he simmered within his own victory. Let the other fools battle over Delmak. Moloch would conquer the galaxy out from under them as they all wasted time and energy trying to conquer a system that didn't even have the capacity generate its own food. Any Goa'uld Lord foolish enough to actually conquer that tar pit of a planet would have to sink enough provisions for an entire military campaign into feeding Delmak on a monthly basis. The shipyards of Delmak weren't worth a damn if the workforce died of starvation.

The Lord of Gehenna reached across the table to pick up the still bleeding head, pulling the apple from its jaws and idly considering the animal. Its pink skin had gone pale from the blood loss, the eyes and tongue plucked to be converted into more delicacies for his Jaffa warriors to gorge themselves.

It had been a pretty beast, only the best was picked to be used for the Lord's table. None of his Jaffa would be so crass as to offer up a beast of anything less than stellar quality. After all, it was not decided till the last moment if the livestock would to warm Moloch's belly or his bed till the last moment.

He gripped the Tau'ri livestock's dismembered head by its long, blonde mane stained red from the butcher's knife. It would not be the first time this livestock had been butchered, and she would be butchered a thousand times more before the sarcophagus tainted her meat's flavor and she finally passed through the flames for her final journey into the second death. But that was a concern for days from now, she would fill the bellies of entire armies before that came to pass.

One only required the head of a lesser being to restore the beast whole – less was required provided that one wasn't too particular about retaining the capacity for higher thinking. The decision to keep the brains intact was a conscious one, a symbolic retention so that the chattel could fully comprehend the magnitude of their sacrifice to their god each time it was made.

Moloch ran his other hand across the bloody lips, letting the red stain his fingers before he wiped it along the forehead and turned to the Goa'uld sitting next to him. "It would seem that our raid upon the former holdings of Sokar have yielded greater fruits than I would have hoped. I believe that this one is of norse blood."

"Indeed, she is, my Lord Moloch," Agreed Mo'al, cracking a bone between his teeth so that he could suck out the marrow. "Sokar had apparently secreted away some of the bloodlines before the Asgard were able to enact the Protected Planets treaty. Many new slaves were taken for those of the faith to sell as wives to the Tau'ri of means."

"And many terminals to provide recreation for those to be converted to the faith among the masses." Moloch agreed, inordinately pleased with himself. Moloch fancied himself one of the few Goa'uld who truly appreciated the power of womanhood. It was he, and he alone, who'd forged a society that used the power of womanhood to its ultimate end. "Provided that the infrastructure to inter them for public use has been secured."

"It has my Lord Moloch." Mo'al grabbed a hunk of bicep from the platter before them. "We should have two thousand new public terminals ready for the common masses, provided that they're willing to accept the terms."

"They always are. They may plant their seed so long as I may sacrifice the crops to the flame." Moloch grinned. Armies, sorcery, and science were all insignificant in comparison to the ability to make life from nothing. Men killed for the right to implant life. Women slew to protect the life they'd born. Nations lived and died for love alone. Moloch would never bring life into the world – he was not born a queen and the injuries he'd suffered in the spawning pool as an infant had been too significant to allow him to bring life into it. But he understood it better than any god or mortal, and honed it into the weapon that would grant him dominion over the stars.

Limit a man's access to the ability to bring life into the world and there was no combination of horrors he would not accept in exchange for the right to gain access to a woman's warmth. Moloch's practice of institutional femicide was the key to his power. Beyond the simple exchange of energy that came when the seed passed across the flames, removing women from the equation rendered the Jaffa and mortal men of his kingdom desperate. By limiting the number of available sexual partners born in his kingdom to a null value, he ensured that the only men to breed were those loyal enough to him to raid enemy territory.

If any mortal man hoped to take a wife, he would have to buy chattel from one of Moloch's Jaffa warriors at the great auctions. Those women taken who proved unpliable or infertile were fodder for the great furnaces, fuel for the Moloch's glory. Moloch's tithe from the raids became the backbone for the public terminals, points of proselytization for mortal men too poor to afford the cost of a wife. Each terminal contained a single glossectomied and exodentically altered inmate, interred within a concrete block along with a life support system so that only the head and hind-quarters were exposed.

The priestesses of Moloch controlled access to the terminals, keeping track of the process as his slaves rendered their seed unto Moloch. Once they detected any pregnancies the fetus could be transferred to a synthetic womb until such time that the seed had matured and could be passed through the fire. With judicious application of nanocytes, each terminal could remain in service for centuries before the nanomachines failed and the livestock's dissolved into dust. Moloch finished his white meat and moved on to the dark, moving a healthy portion of quadricep to his plate as he continued to discuss business with Mo'al. "Do we at least have some degree of diversity in my tithe? The last one taken was practically monochromatic."

"I wouldn't be able to speak to that, Lord Moloch." Mo'al cracked open another finger bone to suck out the marrow. "The actual custody of the chattel was handled by Ishta. I just provided the life support systems for the beasts to be interred."

"Then an answer I shall have." Moloch motioned to his high priestess, summoning her along with her attendants. The blonde Jaffa was the picture of feminine beauty, wide hips and ample breasts marking her as the picture of feminine perfection. Like all priestesses of Moloch, she was a vestal virgin, symbolically subordinating her femininity in worship of the one who owned her soul. She was the perfect woman really, so loyal that he'd not even bothered to bind her with a ritual geas.

She walked across the hall, a picture of abstinence in a hall of carnal joys. She wore a pristine white gown, an icon of the ritual fast that she – and all of the priestesses – chose to start at the beginning of the great feast. Her beatific expression was a serene mask of impassibility as she crossed the hall from her table, the only table not laden down with food in the hall. She really was an amazing woman to be able to resist the sumptuous banquet. Ishta hadn't broken her fast even once in the week-long revelries.

The high priestess supplicated herself before Moloch, kneeling down in front of him and pressing her head to the ground so that the ritual icon upon her forehead kissed the cold marble. "I am yours, now and forever, Lord Moloch."

"Ishta, greatest among the faithful. You honor me with your devotion." Moloch grinned, enjoying the woman's supplication. "Tell me of my tithe."

"We are screening the tithe for utility, Lord Moloch." Ishta spoke over the clamor, raising her voice as their screeches hit fever pitch. "But it is slow going, my lord. Sokar's practices have left many imperfections in the bloodlines."

"Imperfections?" Moloch's lip curled as the vitriolic word rumbled past his lips. Deformed or damaged women weren't of any use to him. Mortal men eschewed their use and their progeny would likely share in their deformity. The ritual power of passing seed into the flames would work if an imperfect child would be used, but he found the practice to be distasteful. Better to just dispose of the livestock's before she took up space and resources that would be better used upon an undamaged breeder.

"Yes, Lord Moloch." Ishta nodded. "Most of the chattel taken from Sokar's realm seem to have multiple weaknesses of blood and spirit."

"Dispose of them." Moloch growled.

"I have already seen to it, my Lord." Ishta replied. "Ten thousand have already walked through the flames."

Not an entire loss then, the symbol of destroying slaves taken in battle was nearly as useful of a sacrifice as one's seed willingly given to the flames. It was an order of magnitude less than would have been generated by a stationary terminal in the halls of worship, but one took what one could get in life. Moloch removed a jellied eyeball from the bowl in front of him, popping it into his mouth and raising his hand to stop the juices from rolling down his chin. He spoke through the gelatinous treat, licking the blue bit of iris off the back of his hand as it rolled across pale flesh. "Have many Jaffa taken new wives in the conquest?"

Ishta's voice colored as she yelled over the butcher's work, the skilled orator struggling to make herself heard over a particularly vocal Tau'ri. Moloch turned to the butcher, making a cutting motion across his neck. The butcher shrugged and sliced his blade hard – terminating her prematurely in the butchering process. The Jaffa who got this particular roast would have to be satisfied with a sub-par cut of meat.

"I apologize, High Priestess, but you do know better than anyone how this mewling quim does prattle on when they know the inevitable has come." Moloch sighed, disappointed at lack of dignity with which Tau'ri always seemed to face their end. If they weren't so easy to repair and so useful for the more esoteric forces of the galaxy he would have gone back to an Unas host long ago. The taste buds of a Tau'ri weren't remotely capable of understanding the bouquet of flavors he was devouring.

"I do understand, Lord Moloch. I understand better than any other woman alive." Replied Ishta, disgust coloring her voice in a way that made Moloch chuckle. The woman truly was a perfect choice for high priestess, she understood the odious failings of mortals and how to properly dispose of those failings.

She understood only a fraction of what she was helping her god to achieve. To her, the walk of the flames was at least partially symbolic. She had no way of entirely understanding the magnitude of the ritual of the flames or why even the mighty god Ra hadn't been able to stop him from continuing the practice. Ra had _loathed_ Moloch, Zeus _loathed_ Moloch, Chronos _loathed_ Moloch, Ba'al _loathed_ Moloch more than he seemed to desire to continue living and none of them had been able take the flames from him. Life was the true power in the universe, and one who had command over it had no need to fear anything.

Death was temporary – life endured.

The High priestess spoke into the sudden silence. "My Lord Moloch – I beg permission to speak."

Moloch's brow rose in curiosity as he drank from his goblet, sipping at the aged wine. The high priestess rarely requested an indulgence, and always made sure to reserve the privilege for a truly fascinating request. "You have it Ishta."

"The High Priestess Muminah has reached out to our faithful to request a meeting for the Lord Warden of Nekheb." Replied the high priestess.

"Whom?" Moloch blinked, there were really too many Goa'uld upstarts nowadays. One could hardly tell them apart any more.

"He who was Heka." Replied his priestess from her position of prayer.

"Oh – yes. Heka's mid-life crisis. I'd all but forgotten about that in light of every other madness he's chosen to enact." Moloch snorted. Heka's habits had become truly repulsive as of late. He was making deals with the Furling Queens and Vampire Courts, if such things were to be believed. Moloch idly wondered what sort of a madman chose to do such things as he popped another eyeball between his lips and chewed in thought.

Heka had never been fond of Moloch's methods, he found Moloch to be both wasteful and cruel. An oddly hypocritical perspective for one so carnally obsessed that he slew every partner after the first encounter. Especially given that his partners were always the most capable of his priesthood. How could anyone expect to maintain any degree of stability in the clergy when rising in its ranks hastened one's demise. It seemed entirely contrary to good sense.

But – Heka had also found a way around the Terms of Winter, with Winter's outright blessing. The ritual of the flames might be restored to its former glory, to the times when even the forces of El had been unable to conquer the Canaanites. He laughed at the thought of Ba'al having to come crawling to _him_ for protection once the Winter Queen allowed him to escape the prohibitions of the Terms.

And there was always the subject of Chronos to consider. The Titan had forgone all sense and actually started working _with_ the beings he'd been tasked to imprison as part of the Terms. His scouts were reporting Hyrda, Hok'unas, and Stragoth marching alongside Jaffa shock troops. Chronos hadn't yet turned his attention to Moloch's borders, but war with Chronos was only a matter of time. The armies of Nekheb were proving able warriors, capable of fighting off the numerically superior armies of Chronos thanks to Heka's continued use of Furling irregulars.

Provisions that would normally have been plundered by Chronos' armies were having to come from his core worlds – meaning that Chronos would either have to start winning a lot more battles or start securing more arable land. Lord Yu's territories were more heavily armed than the now fragmented forces of Sokar and Chronos would have to have been utterly mad to invade the holdings of the Hellenic Pantheons. Though the Hellenic pantheon was a group of disunified city states in practice, whenever any of them was invaded they would suddenly swarm one foolish enough to assume that a lesser Hellenic Goa'uld would be easy prey. Even without provocation, it didn't take much to get them willing to fight Chronos. No, it would be the holdings of Sokar who first fell to the Titan's armies and Moloch was too close to Chronos' border for comfort.

"I will consent to meet the… "Lord Warden," or whatever title it is that Heka has chosen to go by nowadays. But we will meet on a planet of my choosing. Roak or one of the other lesser moons." Moloch rubbed at his chin in thought. "Yes… one of the moons with a temple on it. I believe it is long past time that I consecrated a sacrifice before casting her into the flames."

Ishta actually looked up from the floor in shock. "My Lord Moloch… is that wise? His theology this far has indicated that…"

"Jaffa," Moloch snarled – infuriated by the challenge to his authority. "I have known Heka since before your people knew how to sharpen rocks into weapons or cook your food. He can preach, pray, plan, and proselytize whatever he damn well pleases but _I know Heka_. I have seen his heart. He cannot fool me."

"Yes my Lord," Ishta dropped her head to the ground. "I apologize – it was not, my place to doubt you."

Heka's new theology of "equality" between Jaffa, mortals, and the Gods themselves was preposterously out of line with the man he knew. Heka couldn't afford to reject Moloch's offer of military aid. Rejecting it would be a tacit admission of his inability to entreat with Moloch as an equal, Moloch could pass it off as proof of how he was the greater god. Accepting his aid was tantamount to providing his missionaries all the proof they'd need to suggest that Heka's new philosophies were just a matter of convenience rather than true divine mandate. Either way, Moloch stood to win. He grinned, "Rise, Ishta. You have done well."

The priestess stood up along with her attendants, the cadre of white clad women keeping their gaze averted from their god. "Yes, my Lord. Do you have a preference for the specific sacrifice?"

Moloch picked up the severed head from the table in front of him, passing the flaxen haired livestock's remnants to the high priestess. "Place it in the sarcophagus so that I might restore this one. She will suffice for this exercise."

Ishta took the head from her god, clutching the corpse to her white dress. Red runnels of Tau'ri blood ran down her front, staining her virginal robes crimson. It was a shame for the symbol of her purity to be tainted, but it was forgivable in the service of her god. She bowed her head to Moloch as she backed out from the great hall. She kept her head down in supplication, never turning her back to Moloch as she departed.

"Quite an impressive Jaffa, that one is." Mo'al dabbed at the now empty platter – sopping up the last juices from the meat. "You're lucky to have her my Lord."

"Luck has nothing to do with it." Moloch grinned, looking up and down the table. Apparently most of the Goa'uld had finished their portions of meat and were waiting for their Lord to issue the request for another portion. Nobody was "finished" until Moloch was ready for the next serving. Moloch waved to get the butcher's attention and ordered the next course. "Another one – a readhead this time I think."

Moloch leaned back in his chair, enjoying the feelings of the cushions on his black as the butcher directed Moloch's Jaffa to pull out an appropriate sow, watching as the freckled skinned chattel fought lamely against the inevitable. It really was a magnificent party.

* * *

A/N: Seriously, youtube videos of puppies or something. Cleanse the palette.


	5. Chapter 5

Kweilin city was the gem of Ulan-Tze, a hub of art, culture, and civilization that was, in many ways, more impressive than the capitol city of Jiangmen in the Cradle of Heaven. Lord Yu's sensibilities had always been more militaristic than his wife's had been, choosing to protect his holdings occasionally at the cost of the natural beauty and physical esthetics of the planet upon which he lived. This was not to say that the Cradle of Heaven was ugly, but while the Feng Shui of Jiangmen was in balance there was an artifice to the land and its people.

The beauty of Jiangmen was a combination of the greatest works that could hope to be made by mortal men and gods working in concert, but Xiwangmu was of the opinion that the works of nature vastly outstripped the glories that any man or god could hope to match. The art of Feng Shui could never match the simple harmony of a forest grown by the will of fate alone.

The wide stump upon which she sat had been a favorite place of hers for nearly two millennia, a reminder of better times. She'd planted the tree with her beloved when they'd first colonized the world from a cutting taken from their garden on the First World as a reminder of the palace in Gongyi, the place she'd first kissed her beloved. The first place, for that matter, where she'd understood love.

The Goa'uld had been born without love in their hearts. Altruistic love was not something that came to the ancient predators naturally. The ancient spawning pools in which the first Goa'uld symbiotes had hunted the Unas had been places of violence and cruelty. One fed upon one's fellows, using them to benefit one's own immediate interests often at the cost of symbiotes who'd been ostensible allies for decades if not centuries.

That cruelty and brutality had spread out through the Empire as they'd reached out into the stars. Endless, calculating self-interest the primary motivator behind the Goa'ulds every action. It had been that cruel calculus that had first drawn the interest of the Furlings. Finally, they'd found a species as clever and capricious as they were.

It had not been till they came to the first world that Xiwangmu got a taste of love – true and pure. Xiwangmu and her beloved had entreated with a Hok'tar lord of ancient China, promising that they would protect his people from the predators of the ancient world in exchange for a merging of souls. They adopted the names and roles of their hosts – discarding their previous titles, treating their family lineage as their own and implanting their sons and daughters in the sons and daughters of Yu the Great. It was a shrewd political move, but in forging a partnership with a willing host, Xiwangmu got far more than she'd planned on.

The mortal Xiwangmu loved the mortal Yu with every fiber of her being. It had been overwhelming – something beyond anything the symbiote Xiwangmu had ever experienced. Pure, unselfish and intoxicating, Lady Xiwangmu knew that she would do _anything_ to keep feeling like that. So, she'd done something she hadn't ever previously considered. She started listening to her host. The mortal Xiwangmu had been her closest confidant and friend to the point that when the two ascended into single personhood when she'd finally undergone the ritual of necromantic ascension, she'd gone into mourning for the loss of that friendship. Though, in honesty, she couldn't have begun to say if it was the mortal or immortal Xiwangmu who she mourned.

By that point their personalities had been so in sync that the binding of souls had been a mere formality. Since the terms had been imposed and she'd been broken back into the mortal and immortal, it was impossible to tell if a thought originated from host or symbiote. Xiwangmu was Xiwangmu, the combined wisdom and deviousness of two minds working in concert to ensure their beloved Lord Yu was victorious forever atop the Throne of Heaven.

The Goa'uld lady wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, clearing her throat reflexively to bite back the sob that felt closer and closer to breaking through as she looked at the visible veins upon her aging hands. She rubbed over the silken icon covering her belly, cursing the universe for having robbed her of youth. She was no longer the perfect porcelain doll that had warmed her beloved's bed and bore his children. Yu had never been monogamous, his bed regularly warmed by lesser wives and concubines, but it was not till she'd admitted her infertility to Lord Yu that Lady Xiwangmu realized the horrible truth.

For as much as Xiwangmu had Loved Yu for his strength and guile, Lord Yu had lusted for Xiwangmu's loveliness and the immortality of spreading his bloodline out across the stars. Once she was no longer able to provide for his needs, Lord Yu had quickly become absent from Xiwangmu's bed – and her life.

She'd cut down the tree in a fit of rage when Lord Yu had taken another Goa'uld queen to bed – a lesser queen that she in title, but one who could bear symbiotes with his memories. Her hands still ached in memory of having taken a Jaffa warrior's blade to the thick trunk, hacking till her fingers were bloody and blistered before pushing the reminder of the love that could no longer be hers into the sea below. She'd fallen to her knees atop the broken stump and openly wept that day, wishing that she'd had the courage to throw herself over the cliff as well before her First Prime had come up to her and embraced her.

It had been wholly inappropriate – the sort of thing that should have driven her into apoplectic rage, but she'd just embraced him back as he'd rocked her in his arms, cooing words of comfort to her till she recovered her wits.

He'd wiped away her tears, smiling fondly at his god as he said. "You are stronger than you know, my Lady. And you are worthier than any."

"You overstep your role." She'd sniffled as she took a flask from his hand, some sort of brandy that made her throat burn.

"Perhaps, milady. But if I should have to fall upon my blade from comforting your broken heart, I should welcome the act." He grinned, knowing full well she would ask for no such thing. She'd chosen to travel with her first prime in secret exactly to avoid any perception of weakness. "You have treated me with kindness and dignity for my entire life, have you not earned the same?"

She'd been especially fond of that Jaffa, even before that night, but he'd been the only Jaffa whose ashes she'd consented to have scattered from the outlook when he'd finally died from old age. Xiwangmu reached out to touch the Jaffa's gravestone, running her fingers over his name as she reminded herself, "I am worthy."

She was less prone to melancholy than once she'd been, but every once in a while she found it necessary to remember her love, and why she'd continued. Her love was true, even if it was unrequited. And as her Jaffa had said, she was _worthy_. She was likely worthier than her beloved could ever hope to know, for she'd been scrupulous in choosing the memories that she'd shared with her brood. Of the many millions of children she'd borne from her beloved, she'd chosen to share her love with them.

The brood of Xiwangmu was born with the memory of a mother's love. Love for her husband, love for her children, and love for her people. They were born with the calculation and cleverness of the Goa'uld, but it was tempered by the sense of duty and honor that the mortal Xiwangmu had carried with her. The brood of Xiwangmu were children of China, and in China family mattered above all else.

Lord Yu was the mind guiding of the Kingdom of Heaven, but Lady Xiwangmu was its heart. And it was the beating strength of the heart that kept the body of Heaven moving, even as the mind failed in its old age. For millennia the Goa'uld sub-lords and lieutenants of Yu had been his loving children, invested in his success by default rather than out of self-interest. Under Xiwangmu's subtle guidance and Lord Yu's strength, the Kingdom of Heaven had been so effective in just self-governance that the ultimate decision to leave the First World had been elective.

Unfortunately, the broods sired by Yu into his newest whores were growing in power. Quian, Chiang, and Lao-tsu were the perfect combination of greedy, ruthless, and ambitious that Xiwangmu knew that at least one, if not all, of them would make a grab for power soon. She had no evidence, of course. If she'd been able to present her beloved with even a scrap of fact to support the implication of disloyalty, Lord Yu would have his sons executed on principle. And as much as she would have been overjoyed to destroy a threat to her beloved, she couldn't bring herself to create artifice to doom them. As terrible as they were, they were the sons of her beloved.

Xiwangmu poured tea into two cups, an act that would have been considered blasphemously common if it had been witnessed by any member of her court, but a necessity given how she allowed no servants to enter the outlook. She was going to be hosting company, and it would have been unforgivable not to greet them with a cup of tea. Save her first prime and the women she planned to meet, entry upon the outlook was punishable by summary execution – likely at the blades of the women who walked the narrow path out to the outlook.

Hua Mulan was an oddity in the court of Lady Xiwangmu. She was bout to Xiwangmu only by friendship, the Lady of Ulan-tze having permitted her the freedom to travel Kingdom of Heaven under her banner without demanding an oath of eternal service. Mulan had been a warrior of great merit, earning distinction in the mortal Tang Emperor's armies. When the warrior woman taken her own life to avoid marriage to the Khan, Xiwangmu had resurrected her and offered Mulan and her sworn sister Xianniang the stars themselves. Mulan and her sworn sister had no pledge to Xiwangmu, but Xiwangmu knew them to be more loyal than any pledge might require.

The warrior woman looked much as she'd looked when first she'd come out of the Sarcophagus after her death, the combination of nanomachines and Hok'tar bloodlines having gifted her with exceptional longevity and youth. She was extremely magically weak, but blood was blood. Her face seemed no older than a woman of thirty-five though Xiwangmu knew her to be older than a millennium. Xianniang, of purely mortal stock, had not preserved nearly as well as her sworn sister.

Even with nanomachines to fight off the ravages of time, she seemed more like Mulan's grandmother than her peer. She moved with a warrior's grace, but her limbs were slower than once they'd been.

The two women fell to their knees before Xiwangmu, holding out their swords to her pommel first. Xiwangmu clucked her tongue at the symbolic offer of their own lives in disappointment. She wouldn't require their suicide, but she was annoyed that they'd failed in their task. "Put those away. Honestly, I haven't required your lives for failures much greater than this one."

"My Lady Xiwangmu." Mulan's long braid sent plumes of dust across the ground as she shook her head. "We were unable to prove your suspicions. Quian's patrols do stray close to Chrono's territory, but they appear to be barring his entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. Our spies haven't discovered any connection between his new troops and the Guard of Ages."

"They have to have come from _somewhere_." Xiwangmu growled in irritation, her eyes flashing. "Jaffa do not just appear from _nowhere_. Unless he has been breeding them in secret without _any_ of my spies detecting his plans for twenty years, he has purchased new stock from _someone_."

"Yes milady, but even at a glance they are not of the Guard of Ages. Even if we were to assume that they were not bred from the stock of the Emperor's Hand, their bloodline seems close to the Imperial Guard of Amaterasu than the olive-skinned servants of the Titan." Spoke the elder warrior woman. "The are skilled with a blade, and seem confident in the martial arts of the Emperor's Hand in a way that the Guard of Ages cannot hope to match."

"Do not be so foolish as to assume that blood rules over all. Flesh can be altered, minds can be taught." Xiwangmu snarled, her eyes flashing even as she internally agreed with the women. The cost of surgically altering an entire army to superficially appear like the Emperor's Hand would have been prohibitively expensive. If Quian had the resources to achieve that, the wealth would be better spent just raising a large enough fleet to conquer Heaven or buy the loyalty of one of the great Dragons.

"Yes Lady Xiwangmu." Spoke both of the warrior women in unison as Xiwangmu shoved cups of piping tea into their hands. They waited for her to sip at her cup before drinking from theirs, the warm liquid passing the three women's lips in contemplative silence. The Goa'uld lady smiled wry enjoyment as the two warrior women sighed in utter contentment. Five thousand years of experience with the Beveridge led to truly heavenly cup of tea. She was confident that a single cup of her brew would calm the heart of even the most savage beasts of the galaxy.

"And what of the other concern?" Spoke Lady Xiwangmu as she refilled the warrior women's cups with more of her godly brew. "The Lord Warden?"

Dou Xianniang laughed out loud. "The Lord Warden is at war."

"Of course he is – he's been at war every second of every day since taking on his new mantle. Even _Ares_ occasionally pauses for breath." Xiwangmu hissed in irritation as she stoked the device beneath her pot of tea, adjusting the heat to the desired temperature.

"A different war, this time, my Lady." The warrior woman replied in droll delight, still unable to keep hiccupping laughter from her voice. "You… you will enjoy this one greatly."

The Empress of Heaven arched her brow. The warrior women were not prone to girlish fits of giggles, and those few moments in which they indulged were rarely without cause. Even Mulan seemed to be having difficulty keeping a straight face at whatever it was that had tickled her sworn sister's fancy.

Dou Xianniang swallowed, hiccupping briefly as she struggled to maintain proper decorum. "The Lord Warden is at war with _Moloch_."

"Moloch…" The Empress replied, pursing her lips as she too had to resist the urge to let a fit of giggles overtake her. "The Madman who has done business with the Furlings and Red Court is unleashing the nightmare army on _Moloch_?"

"Indeed." Mulan replied, unable to keep herself from breaking down into outright hysterics. Her voice was barely comprehensible through a hyena like rip of laughter as she said. "He used a banner of truce as a trap to show up and kill Moloch's elite guard single handedly, forcing the loathsome letch to flee with his tail between his legs."

"Then Moloch actually tried to _publicly denounce_ the Warden for being violent and untrustworthy. _Moloch_ , accused someone else of being untrustworthy." Dou Xianniang wiped tears from her eyes. "Moloch, as though anyone would take his word! The warden could have annihilated the appointed meeting place from orbit and the System Lords would have considered it self-defense."

Xiwangmu shook her head sadly. "Good that he did not… I do not wish to face the repercussions of Moloch's death. Loathsome though he may be, he has seen fit to ensure that his death would cause more trouble than his continued survival. Ra and my beloved would have gladly killed the so called Lord of Gehenna if they could – likely with the Furling's blessing. But there are… consequences…"

The Warrior women nodded sadly, all too aware of the reasons they'd not been permitted to crush Moloch with the Armies of Heaven when Mulan had first discovered the disposition of Moloch's citizens. The Hok'tar general loathed Moloch almost has much as she'd hated the Khan. Xiwangmu found little error in her logic.

"The Lord Warden has proven remarkably immune to consequences." Don Xianniang's lips quirked.

"And remarkably dangerous, do not become enamored with the myth of the Warden. He is still Heka, the Dark Sorceror King who traded the Pantheon's divinity for their survival without asking our permission." Xiwangmu shook her head. "He was Moloch's ally and peer until a year ago, just because he's seen into the man's library deep enough to circumvent Moloch's failsafe does not mean that he is to be trusted. Not matter how good the legends he spawns might be."

"The romantic heroes of Nekheb are… intoxicating." Mulan agreed. "Heka's gift for poetry has proven an able tool in securing the loyalty of his forces."

"The man worked with my beloved to spread writing across the first world, of course he understands the value of words." Xiwangmu shook her head. "Though I will confess… his tales have adapted as of late."

Not just adapted. They'd changed entirely in a way that perhaps only Xiwangmu herself was equipped to understand. The Lord Warden's stories were, ultimately, love stories. They were stories in which the protagonist won, not because he was loyal to his god, but because he was loyal to his heart. The warrior Luke brought his father back from the service to the Dark Sorcerer-King for love. The spider man used his powers only for good in memory of the uncle he loved. The Batman fought for justice because he'd been robbed of love. His stories spoke to service of an ideal rather than submission to a god, and they'd become infectious for that.

There were romantic tales in the Kingdom of Heaven like those of Heka's new cult, but they never came from her beloved. They were folk stories and romanticized history, not allegory from their Immortal Emperor. Perhaps she would employ poets to ghost write similar allegory to be similarly attributed to her beloved.

"And what of his pirates?" Xiwangmu poured herself another cup.

"The Lucian Alliance grows with power, my Lady." Mulan's face lost any vestiges of amusement. "There are many worshippers of the Warden among them, but we haven't been able to secure any data to suggest direct military aid from Nekheb."

"Men do no follow a god who does not serve them." Xiwangmu shook her head. "The connection is there. And you will find it."

"I will find what exists." Mulan hedged, clearly uncomfortable. "But Netan's power structure is very fragmented. His Council of Seconds are largely self-governing and they're growing stronger by the day as they steal ships and weapons from the chaos of Sokar's realm."

"They're mortal Pirates. Find them, and crush them." Xiwangmu replied. "Is there anything else you have to report?"

"No, my lady." The warrior women replied, standing up in unison as she waved them away. The warrior women walked from the outcropping and out of view as Xiwangmu stared out across the sea. She paid them no mind as they left her, an Empress did not waste time on lesser once they'd been dismissed.

She balled her hands in the fabric of her dress as she rested her hand upon her first prime's headstone once again, leaning down to kiss the surface. "She will succeed, old friend. She too, is worthy."

Wiping tears from her eyes for the second time that day, Lady Xiwangmu started brewing another pot of tea.


	6. Chapter 6

Nefertum really just wanted to go home. He'd never felt any special degree of loyalty to either Sokar or to Heka, and for the life of him he couldn't figure out why he was needed for this meeting. He'd never been a particularly rich member of the pantheon of Ra, either in holdings or in slaves, and he'd been forced to cede most of his more host-rich planets as a result of the treaty forming a demilitarized zone between the Yoroba and Igbo pantheons so that Olokun's onging war with Chukwu could be brought to a statemate. Unfortunately, it was specifically his lack of power, influence, or standing within the community that made him the perfect arbiter for this conference.

He'd never been important enough to merit a grudge, and he wasn't strong enough to be manipulating the conference to his advantage. In truth, being selected for the "honor" of arbitration was bordering on outright insult. It meant that none of the parties involved felt him capable of deceiving them.

Given that he would be offering even greater insult to the other Goa'uld by denying their summons, however, Nefertum found himself in a crumbling palace on one of Ra's abandoned holdings. Like most of Ra's chosen planets, it was a sweltering desert devoid of grass, trees, or any of the signs of life that Nefertum found not only desirable but necessary for any degree of comfort. He kicked at the sand dejectedly, there wasn't even a scrap of earth around the temple that would let things grow.

Even the moss on the columns was fossilized, it didn't seem like rain had visited the planet in years. Whichever mechanism or ritual had brought the rains to this world hadn't lasted without Ra's explicit guidance. The great room for the Chappa'ai still stank vaguely of the villagers who'd died praying for his salvation, mummified corpses sun-baked after four years under the blistering sun. He'd directed his Jaffa, all three of them in service to him, to clear the gate room before negotiations so that he could try to find some greenery and collect his thoughts.

He was without greenery and possessed a collection of too many thoughts to divide in any rational manner. The greatest of Pantheons was in utter upheaval. Ra's death had been tragic beyond belief, but his passing had been inevitable. The God among Gods was a role to be coveted and eventually conquered by those beneath him – that it was Apophis who took his place was only fitting. Day was inevitably replaced by night.

But the upheaval hadn't stopped with Apophis' bid for power. The galaxy was in utter chaos. Gods who'd walked in the times before Apep had brought them from the First World were dying in pointless border skirmishes over worlds without resources. Ancient Queens thought lost to the First World were walking among the Patheons one moment, then dead at Tau'ri hands the next. Byblows of the ancient Adversary like the Reetou were wandering the stars, hunting gods for sport. Entire Pantheons had been consumed in war, leaving Empires in ruins as Alliances were called upon from times long forgotten.

He would much rather have been home on his little moon tending to the garden he'd cultivated over the past five millennia. It was a lovely place with a large pond in which he kept fish and frogs, fat and lazy creatures perfect for him to consume in those times when he vacated his host body to enjoy the freedom and simplicity of his own serpentine form.

He was generally content to just leave his followers to their own devices, content in the knowledge that if and when he required a host that he only needed to poke his head from the surface of the pool and cry out to whichever of his servants was closest. If a servant wasn't in easy reach he'd often just make use of a cat, there never seemed to be any shortage of cats in his palace.

He had no particular love of the human form, or any host for that matter. Appendages other than his fins just felt extraneous, and he very much disliked the strange hormonal impulses that always came from the Tau'ri whenever they caught sight of someone they felt attractive. Once this summit ended he would just go back to his pond and bask in the sunlight munching on the fat Toad that had been disrupting his sleep the past three weeks.

Nefertum turned at the sound of footsteps, catching sight of his First Prime. It was perhaps an vainglorious title for the head of an army of three, but she did her best to please her god. Thus far her dedication in overseeing Nefertum's garden and stocking the pool with fish had been immaculate, so Nefertum found her as acceptable as any other general he'd had thus far.

He knew by his host's reaction that she was considered quite beautiful, but he couldn't quite figure out why precisely. The man he was inhabiting was focused on strange attributes like deposits of fat and the wet curves of the female Jaffa's lips, all of which felt like remarkably poor factors in choosing a partner. He pushed down the host's lust, searching his memories for the name of his First Prime only for it to escape him entirely.

How can anyone be expected to keep track of the names of Jaffa? They died and needed to be replaced every couple hundred years. He wasn't even entirely sure that this First Prime was the same one he remembered having served him three hundred years prior when he vacated his last host. Fortunately, a certain degree of aloofness was expected form the gods. "Speak."

The Jaffa bowed. "My Lord Nefertum, they have arrived."

"Very well." Nefertum sighed, reaching out to the petrified moss and sighing disappointedly when it dissolved into dust. "I suppose there's no delaying any longer."

"No, my lord. Your mother requests your presence." The Jaffa bowed even more deeply, clearly worried to be delivering his mother's directive to her god.

Nefertum supposed that she was expecting for him to slap her or something equally ridiculous. His guests often indulged in that sort of behavior when his servants told them things they didn't care to hear. Perhaps, if his mother had elected to share any of her genetic memories with him, he might have understood the urge. Then again, if he'd been gifted with the memories of his family he would have to remember all that they'd lost. Perhaps it was just as well not to feel their bitterness.

He arched a brow at the Jaffa's pointless supplication, rolling his eyes in annoyance at the lesser creature and leading the way back to the gate. He blinked in brief confusion as he re-entered the temple proper, briefly having to reconcile the abandoned palace with the vision of opulence that now greeted him. His mother seemed to have brought half a palace worth of furniture, slaves and amenities with her, deploying them through the gate so quickly that he would have suspected it was the power of the old days were he not intimately aware that Bastet was stripped of all power after the Fall.

She had thankfully obeyed his requirement that attendees not bring weapons, they could bring a single Jaffa and as many servants as they chose, but only a single Jaffa in an effort to limit the potential for bloodshed.

His mother approached him with open arms, her olive-skinned host young and beautiful as always. He briefly wondered what imperfection had merited her new choice of host, but Bastet was prone to mercurial bouts of fancy. She was as likely to have shown up in the body of a Sekhmet as of a Tau'ri.

"What is this ghastly thing you're wearing?" Bastet fretted over Nefertum's host, fiddling with the excess flesh hanging from Nefertum's jowls. "It looks positively hideous, practically ancient."

"So am I, mother." Nefertum rolled his eyes. "It is a perfectly serviceable host."

"It looks like it might keel over at a stiff wind." The goddess clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "You were named for your beauty, you should pick hosts accordingly."

"Mother you named me for the way my scales glimmered against the light of the water lilies." Nefertum replied glibly. "Any host I might choose would only serve to conceal the very beauty you chose to venerate."

"I had hoped that five hundred years of being left to your own devices might have cured you of your criminal distaste for proper fashion." Bastet purred in mild irritation, curling up on one of the Kline laid out by her servants and patting the one next to her as a Tau'ri maiden poured her a generous measure of wine. "Kali warned me that it would be for naught, but I was sure that you might cure yourself of this obsessive decline into mediocrity."

Nefertum was endlessly greatful when the Chappa'ai activated, breaking his mother's train of thought as two figures materialized through the gate. The god Montu and a single Jaffa, presumably his First Prime. The war god was a nominal ally of Heru'ur but not so entrenched within Heru'ur's leadership that he'd yet chosen a side. In short order he was followed by Hapi, Mafdet, Tefnut, Tawaret, Menhit, Babi and Heket as the gate died then activated over and over again, allowing each of the gods to come with their servants and soldiers. They made a confusing menagerie given the eclectic taste in hosts favored by Ra's brood.

The first bloodlines of Apep were old enough that they'd been alive for the times before the Tau'ri and Hok'taur were the favored choice of host, and even after discovering the first world not all had elected Tau'ri hosts. Tawaret in particular had elected for custom catered hosts rather than bog-standard Tau'ri. Through a complex interweave of genetic manipulation she'd created a chimeric mix of hippopotamus and feline, augmenting it heavily with cybernetics to make it heartier than any of the Unas. It couldn't help by strike him as comical as she perched daintily on the long bench, two tons of cybernetic super-beast at the center of a formal gathering.

Babi was nearly as off-putting, the man's obsession with baboons having long ago led him to genetically and surgically manipulate all hosts to mirror the appearance of his favored animal. That would have been distracting enough even without the entourage of cybernetically modified baboons tied into the Babi's increasingly senile mind.

The cybernetically uplifted Gorilla serving as Babi's first prime was more than sufficient to dissuade Nefertum from finding the man's eclectic nature too comical, however. It was only one Jaffa from several entire legions of uplifted great ape warriors forming the core of Babi's Jaffa armies. It was a minor blessing that Babi was too insane to mount a proper offensive or to care about warfare long enough to keep conquered territory.

Quetesh was, of course, not in attendance. She would be too busy waging war upon Ba'al for her to reasonably be able to attend a conference of her peers.

Nefertum waited for each of them to be seated and provided refreshments before he spoke. Protocol was everything at a meeting of the Goa'uld, if one spoke at a moment that was not their appointed turn one risked offense or perhaps even vendetta from one's peers.

Traditionally the host of an event was expected to sit in silence as one's guests quarreled over old grievances and grudges, allowing them to vent however many hundred years of hatred thy had broiling beneath the surface before electing to speak. It was viewed as a necessary part of any negotiation, once all grievances were known then one could understand their position in bargaining.

Nefertum suspected this process had been started back in the times before the Goa'uld lived long enough to actually develop any substantial grudges worth speaking. But the Goa'uld were nothing if not creatures of habit, and they'd fostered grudges as long as recorded galactic history.

He sat in silence for two days as his peers aired their grievances about each other, his only reprieve the blissful moments when someone said something insulting enough for the entire group to disperse and walk to their own tents to rest until all parties were prepared to continue.

On the third day, oh that blissful third day, the last grudge was spoken, and he was finally certain that he could speak without enraging his fellow gods. "Are we prepared to continue to the matter at hand?"

The collected Goa'uld grunted in various forms of assent, with the notable exception of Hapi who seemed to have fallen asleep from boredom. The rotund god was snoring loudly, his sizable belly jiggling with each deep breath. Hapi was probably the only Goa'uld less interested in politics than Nefertum . The bulbous god had once been a fertile Queen, but was long enough past menopause that he knew that he was free of the machinations of any would be ruler's Imperial aspirations.

"We are collected here to discuss the issue of succession within the High Blood of Apep." Nefetum spoke calmly, far calmer than he felt considering the potentially volatile words he was about to speak. "And the disappearance of Ra's Mantle."

That there was not even a word of dispute to that last statement spoke volumes more than Nefertum cared to consider.

It was Bast who broke the silence. "I am correct in saying that none of you inherited it? Nor do you know who did?"

"It is somewhere." Babi's ape-like grin was monstrous as he cackled. "Were it gone, we would know."

"How?" Heket snarled, utter contempt in her voice. "We understand nothing of the power used to create the mantle of Ra, and only the meagerest of why. It could have dispersed to the four winds, been taken by blood from whence we came, or destroyed by a rival to the Pantheon."

"Do you not feel it still? Taste it?" Babi chittered. "It remains."

"Nonsense, if one of the blood were the God among Gods, they would have declared themselves King already. It would be pointless to take the burden otherwise." Montu dismissed the idea utterly. "It brought the King of God's luck and glory beyond measure but bound the ambition of all pantheons against him."

"Not so greatly that he was unable to assert dominion though." Disagreed Bast. "Conceivably one of our number could just be biding their time – waiting for the proper moment to strike."

"The mantle drives its holder to needing conquest. They need to rule the Goa'uld. They need to crush those who oppose their chosen order." Heket clicked her tongue. "Ra's mantle was not diluted by the Terms, any who'd been touched by its power would be compelled into a war of conquest long before now, and we to wage war back upon it if able. The power would not allow itself to remain dormant."

"Ra is dead. His peace died with him." Bastet agreed. "We cannot rely upon the binding compulsion of Ra's power to control the ambition of the worst among our kind."

He let the silence of his fellow gods linger upon the air before continuing. "We are at a crossroads. There are now three individuals with sufficient power and rank within our pantheon that they might be considered to replace Ra. Heru'ur, Apophis… and Heka."

That did get a response from the other gods. Montu stood to his feet, his host's surgically altered eyes fixing on him with predatory malice as their avian pupils glowed with rage. "The betrayer is unfit to rule. He has rejected the very memory of our pantheon, claiming titles and power without any history linking him to us."

"It is perhaps that lack of history that has allowed him to operate within the auspices of an Alliance with the Furlings." Replied Bastet as she sipped at her goblet of wine. "His rise from obscurity has been meteoric in scope."

"Do not let your hatred of the Cananites to blind you woman," The God of war cut his hand across the air from left to right. "He is the puppet, not the puppeteer. And I will not bind myself to another puppet of Winter."

"Apophis had no more ties to Winter after the Folly than Ra had to Summer." Tawaret replied indignantly, her mechanical voice box articulating the words which a Hippopotamus' mouth would have been ill adapted to speak. "Should we be avoiding Heru'ur for the ancient politics of his father? If we avoided anyone who formerly had ties with the Furlings we'd soon without a pantheon."

"The issue of former ties seems rather petty in light of Heka's entirely current alliance with the Demons of Winter." Mafdet interjected nervously. The former Ashrak was in a precarious position after the death of Ra, her exclusive patron. She'd been at war with Heka more than once, and the man kept grudges. "But neither Heru'ur nor Apophis have the upper hand in conquering what remains of Sokar's territory."

"Semantics." Tawaret's mechanical voice box rumbled. "It is inevitable that we will be forced to choose sides. I have already been approached by emissaries from both Apophis and Heru'ur. Choosing neither will be seen as a tacit alliance with the enemy by whomever emerges the victor."

"Can we assume either?" Tefnut spoke in callous monotone, betraying no trace of loyalty to her grandson Heru'ur. "They are the one who've reached out to us, but there remains the possibility that Heka will emerge the victor. He does have the forces of both Sun and Snow… perhaps even the forces of the First Maya of the stories are to be believed."

"Are you suggesting that we surrender to the will of Winter and Summer?" Montu growled in disgust.

"I am stating facts." Tefnut shook her head, jingling the precious metals interspersed within her headdress. "Wars have many losers but few victors, especially in wars of the Blood of Apep. Without Ra's mantle to define the line of succession we are forced to choose our own ruler. And though I personally find it distasteful, it has not escaped my attention that Heka's military power is augmented by the powers that once conquered all the Pantheons simultaneously. I do not believe it an accident that Heka has sent out no envoys seeking allies among the gods."

"He has the Allegiance of Ammit an Enlil." Tawaret scratched at her chin with a tiger-like claw. "Presumably he reached out to them at some point."

"Blood of Apep, Tawaret. Your intelligence services are truly abysmal." Montu rolled his eyes in disgust. "He took them with him while escaping Delmak. They latched on to his military victories by pure chance. He tolerates their presence but has not actually formally recognized either of them as members of his new household. His connection to them is a matter of immediate convenience. They are permitted no slaves and no properties to call their own – they might as well be Jaffa."

"Have truly none of us been approached by any diplomats from Nekheb?" Heket's genuine horror mirrored Nefertum 's own. "I knew that Heka wouldn't ever reach out to me but I had assumed that he would reach out to his old allies."

"No." Babi replied in bitter contempt. "He has not. Though he is perfectly happy to poison my slaves against me."

"He has not made any effort to reach out to any Pantheon, except to wage war against them." Nefertum 's mother ran her finger around the rim of her goblet. "And I do not believe his actions to be the product of madness or arrogance, there is too much consistency to his actions."

"So we are left to chose between a ruler who has never won a war, a ruler who has lost several wars, and a ruler who does not seem overly interested in ruling us except as slaves." Babi's simian servants screeched angrily around him, influenced by the psychic feedback from the Goa'uld's rage transported through their networked intelligence.

"There is an alternative." Suggested Bastet. "We could choose none of them."

"I will not bow before you." Menhit affirmed, crossing her arms across her chest. The Nubian War Goddess had a particular hatred for his mother. "If not for your ally Kali you would have no territory at all."

"It is precisely the nature of my alliance with Kali that makes me an expert on how to survive this." Bastet purred, rising to her feet and gesturing skyward. "Space is infinite – quibbling over territory is a colossal waste of time. Kali and I have established a history of protecting each other's interests when they are threatened and leaving each other alone in those times when they are not. I am not suggesting that I rule any of you. I am suggesting that we dismiss the concept of a ruler entirely."

"But someone must rule." Montu replied, horrified at the anarchic concept. "Else we are no better than the Hellenic Pantheon."

"They are the least damaged among us, if you recall." Bast replied firmly. "It was not the brood of Zeus who followed Anubis into the breach, or they who acted on Thoth's Folly."

"I will have no part in this." Montu stood, waving to his first prime as he looked around the room. "I am off to pledge myself to Heru'ur. I will welcome any who have the sense do the same."

"I will enjoy crushing you on the field of battle." Tawaret laughed, her Hippopotamus lips flapping with each wet, rumbling guffaw. "Puppet of Heru'ur – We are in the time of moonlight, it is foolish to think otherwise."

Montu raised his palm reflexively, so accustomed to having a hand device attached that he'd apparently forgotten that they were all disarmed at the gate. His eyes bulged in regret as Tawaret reacted to the aggressive movement, throwing herself at the god of war and flinging him across the room.

The room devolved into chaos as God's pulled concealed weapons from their person in total violation of the rules of the summit, attacking each other at seemingly random. a

Nefertum called out for his Jaffa as Mehnit kicked a Baboon over his head. The cybernetically enhanced creature broke in half on a stone pillar, its arms and legs flailing as the bisected animal continued to try and fight. He dragged his mother away from the quarreling gods as the trio of Jaffa burst into the room with Staff weapons, firing them into the air in an effort to dissuade the rioting gods from attacking them without doing any of them an actual injury.

Bastet laughed uproariously as Nefertum pulled her into the open air, seemingly giddy at the violence. "Mother! Now is hardly the time."

"Oh child, now is exactly the time." She replied as the sound of the gate activating was met with the disappearance of the angry baboon screeches. Babi seemed to have made his escape. "Did you think that his was destined to end any other way?"

"A bit, yes." Nefertum replied as he watched a pillar of light go into the sky to someone's cloaked transport ship. There was a screeching leonine roar from inside the palace, and the sounds of battle quickly became horrified screams. Nefertum blinked and looked at his mother. "You didn't?"

"I very much did." Bast grinned from ear to ear as she walked back into the gate room. The summit location was in ruins, most of the servants and slaves had been killed along with a decent portion of Babi's Baboons. Babi, Montu, Tawaret and Menhit seemed to have made their retreat, but the remaining Gods had been subdued by a small army of towering felines.

The Sekhmet weren't a particularly well known species, they were one of several pre-Tau'ri races used as hosts and slaves by the Goa'uld, and remained mostly an oddity of Bast's realms. The were not as hearty as the Unas, but they were strong, dangerous and deadly fast. Apparently Bastet had not disbanded her Skehmet armies after adopting the use of Jaffa.

Hapi woke from his slumber, blinking in confusion as he looked at the carnage around him and the towering felines subduing their Goa'uld betters. He looked to Bastet, pursing his lips. "Whatever they said or did – I disagree with it."

"Of course." Bastet replied, sitting back down on one of the remaining Kline. "Now, I believe we were discussing the terms of our new coalition, under the direction of my Son's arbitration."

"Mother, I believe that this is the proper time for a recess so that we might… consider what has been said." Nefertum placed his hand on his mother's shoulder. "I think that we've all gotten the message."

"Of course," Bast kissed her child's hand. "You are such a thoughtful boy."

Nefertum would really rather have been back in his garden.


	7. Chapter 7

Heru'ur locked himself within his chambers, stat down in his bed, placed his head in his hands, and wept for what had become of the Empire his father built. Even at the moment of his birth, Heru'ur remembered everything. He remembered his father's pride as Apep marked him as favored among the Goa'uld. He remembered father's need for his mother and hers for his father in return. He remembered the aspirations his mother had felt for his brood as she'd spawned them, the glories his parents had wanted for his lineage.

Blending with his first host and finally having the chance to see the smiling, boyish face of Ra looking down at him with his trademark roguish smirk was the first memory that was Heru'ur's own. But it was a treasured one for the tutelary deity, tasked with the most dangerous and noble of goals in Ra's Empire. It had been he who'd been responsible for ensuring that the Tau'ri and Hok'tar were sufficiently governed. He'd fostered monarchies and dynasties that mirrored the simplicity of the Gods themselves, imbuing them with power and authority in their name.

His loyalty to his father's name was without question. Those who worshiped Ra worshipped Heru'ur in the same breath, without flinching. And though Heru'ur did not hold the protection of his father's power any longer, he served his father after the fall with the filial love and loyalty befitting of the heir apparent to the Lord Solar Almighty. Nothing had brought him greater pride than the honor of serving his father.

It had been he alone who Ra trusted with the mission of destroying the temple of the First Maya in which Hathor's Sarcophagus was imprisoned," so that the risen Blood Born could not feed upon Ra's wife. And it had been he who his father had tasked to destroy his mother when her treachery became apparent.

For when his armies arrived at the ancient continent's shores, they discovered an army of Jaffa loyal to Hathor fighting _alongside_ the forces of the First Maya. Rumors of Hathor's imprisonment had been greatly exaggerated. His asp of a mother adopted the name Ixal and bound herself to the Great Lord Kukulkan through a pact of blood – betraying all pantheons to monstrous Red Hunger of the Maya.

The armies of the First Maya still haunted Heru'ur's dreams.

She'd bound her power to them, lacing their very saliva with the power of Nishta born from her own flesh so that they could corrupt the will of mortal men with only a kiss. Her hunger for power produced an army too great for Heru'ur to overcome, to her ultimate downfall. Hathor's powers of persuasion proved insufficient to protect herself from the Lords of Outer Night. The patience of the Red Court was vast, but their hunger was infinite.

A sheep can never trust the Wolf's goodwill while trying use their strength to help rule the flock.

It was unclear exactly how the Goddess of Lust ultimately met her undoing, but once all other Jaffa were no longer on Earth and the gates were either sabotaged or buried, the only food left for the Red Hunger were the Jaffa of Hathor. Really, the Goa'uld owed the Asgard a debt of gratitude for destroying the goddess' fleet above Earth before the battle of Djer's Lament, else the Maya might have spread out to feed upon the stars.

He had cared for his mother and mourned the loss of what she had been, but she'd made her own fate when she joined the Vampires.

Rumors even still persisted that Heru'ur's traitorous mother yet lived, but he doubted that the Maya would have ever willingly curbed their hunger for the flesh of a God. One among the Lords of Outer night empowered by the bloodstone would find themselves quickly elevated to the abilities lost when the Terms were imposed upon the Pantheons.

He wiped the tears from his eyes, standing from his bed and walking over to the space station's window. The shipyards of Soma-Kesh were operating at maximum capacity, churning out war materials for the battle that would soon be waged upon Apophis. Heru'ur couldn't afford to allow Apophis to consolidate his power on Delmak. Sokar's industrial powerbase was nearly as strong as Ra's had been _before_ the fragmentation of Ra's pantheon after his death. If Apophis managed to get that operational Heru'ur would soon be unable to match production rates. The ships produced by Soma-Kesh were vastly superior to those of Delmak, designed with the most advanced systems Ptah periodically deigned to distribute to the rest of the Pantheon from whatever galactic fringe world he was currently exploring.

Even that technological edge could only be relied upon somewhat. Ptah was irregular in his distribution of information and did so largely out of historical loyalty to Sokar rather than out of any true alliance to the pantheon of Ra. Once the conflict expanded to include individuals like Bast with whom Ptah had existing loyalties, Heru'ur worried that the wandering god might involve himself directly and not necessarily in Heru'ur's favor.

Heru'ur loved the angular vessels of the fleet. There was an elegance and simplicity to the humble Ha'tak mothership. The hard geometries appealed to the Goa'uld sense of order, strong shapes that even the weak eyes of a symbiote without a host would be able to see. Goa'uld had an inherent _need_ for order and simplicity, a structural demand born of the blood from which the Goa'uld were spawned. When the precursors had died, and their blood had first stained the earth of the primordial world from whence the Tribes of Apep walked out into the stars, they'd infected the Goa'uld with their prehistoric need to battle chaos and impose order on their dominion.

He took it as some small comfort that Apophis' plan to create a Harcesis Child seemed to have failed. Apophis would not have kept the shell of the God he'd once been if the infant son of Amaunet were available to him as a host. It terrified Heru'ur that any among the goa'uld had been so bold – Ra's prohibition had largely been a formality, it was pure madness to even consider creating such a child.

The creation of Harcesis had been explicitly allowed under the terms, vocally so. It had been the final insult of the Winter Queen. Any human child born of two Goa'uld would be born with the full memories of the Goa'uld, entirely unburdened by the limitations of the terms and born with the full Hok'tar capacities that the Goa'uld lusted for when first they came to Tau'ri.

Effectively, Harcesis would be born with all the tools and knowledge necessary to ascend to true godhood. They would not, however, be able to be controlled. A Goa'uld could only command the body of a Harcesis by virtue of the host's consent. One risked becoming a slave to their own ambition the moment a Harcesis was old enough to wean themselves from their mother's teat. Only the most egotistical or insane of gods would ever create such a creature. Sokar had been able to unite the pantheons _against_ Apophis' fledgling Empire at the very _rumor_ that Apophis had created one.

There were some lines that shouldn't be crossed. Even Moloch had been willing to commit military aid to preventing an Harcesis from being allowed to come into being. It was choices like the one Apophis had made that first led to the Folly of Thoth and nearly resulted in the doom of all things.

Heru'ur suspected that the Tau'ri were responsible for slaying the child. It was obvious to him given the combined presence of Daniel Jackson on Abydos and the man's transparent lie that Apophis had "taken" the child. The man had obviously slain the infant son of Apophis. Heru'ur didn't blame the man, any man would have slain a child born of his wife against her will. Heru'ur knew Daniel Jackson's force of will well enough to know that slaying an infant wasn't beyond the man when his duty required it.

Daniel Jackson, the impossible man, was the only person in the galaxy whose claim he believed when they boasted to have engineered the death of the King of Gods. He'd heard the rumors that the Generals of the ancient Tau'ri rebellions were walking the stars again, all Goa'uld had. But he wouldn't have believed it had he not seen it with his own two eyes.

The Scholar of the Gate Builders yet lived.

Heru'ur had been _astonished_ to come face to face with his ancient enemy when first he'd seen the Scholar on Abydos. He'd assumed that two Tau'ri had just _adopted_ the monikers of Ra's old rivals, not that three thousand years later he'd be looking into the same eyes he'd seen on the battlefields of Giza.

It was perhaps that shock that stayed his hand from slaying his father's murderer in an instant, though _fear_ was probably a better description of his feelings in the moment. When last he'd met the Scholar it had been retreating from the vast armies serving under him, fleeing the Council of the Merlin. One could never be sure what treachery the Scholar had planned, but one could be sure that anything but the most careful of treatment would end in disaster.

So what madness had taken him in replying to the Scholar's offer of peace? The mad words had escaped his lips before he'd even fully realized who he was speaking with. He'd marked himself as an enemy of the Scholar on impulse, reactively, "Alliance? You are nothing. Your world is nothing. Once I have conquered Apophis, I will make slaves of your people. You will serve me."

He could blame his ancient hatred of the man. He'd lost a war to him. He could blame the fact that he knew the Tau'ri were claiming credit for Ra's death. He could claim that it was rage in the head of the moment. But he knew it was none of these. It was a compulsion from the time before the Terms, a power imposed upon him from some agreement he couldn't even remember having bound himself. Once the magically compelled words left his lips he knew that caution was required to survive what was unfolding.

He readied his ribbon device as his Jaffa forced the Scholar to kneel, intent upon probing the man's mind to discover the trap he was walking into. He was not foolish enough to believe that the Scholar would be on the same world as Amaunet by accident. The Scholar had _detested_ Apophis for time immemorial, Heru'ur could be certain that there was some greater purpose in Daniel Jackson's presence.

That caution was immediately affirmed when the Scholar's eternal companion exited the Chappa'ai, piercing the veil of Heru'ur's shield with a mundane dagger and wounding Heru'ur through a major artery. He'd retreated to his flagship cursing the Fisherman's name, ordering an immediate retreat from Abydos before some other monster from the Time of Legends appeared to unmake him.

Heru'ur _forbade_ his Jaffa from attacking the world, horrified of the doom that might befall him if he caught the attention of the only men his Father had ever feared. It was not without precedent.

Ra's final command to Heru'ur after the loss of the First World had been a prohibition against seeking revenge upon the Fisherman and the Scholar. One was allowed to fight them if necessary, but never to seek out their attention. To do so would invite doom upon the Pantheon, Ra insisted till his dying day. Though it was likely Ra feared them more than most given the Summer Queen's promise of concealment. The King of Gods could be face to face with either of them and no more recognize them than a stranger on the street.

His first act after gaining control of the Pantheon would be to forge some sort of peace with the Tau'ri. They were becoming expansionist and if he didn't move quickly they'd start associating all Goa'uld with those few who were greedy or insane enough to act directly against the First World. But he couldn't devote the necessary resources to diplomacy without first establishing himself as King of the Gods. To do so would invite disaster.

He would quickly be seen in the same light as Heka, a monster who and bound himself to even greater monsters. One could not earn the loyalty of the System Lords while one was marching alongside their ancient enemies. He might as well try to forge an alliance with the Asgard for all the benefit it would bring him. Heru'ur would soon find himself entirely without allies if he forged an alliance with the poisoned world.

Isolation benefited neither his own interests or the goals of the Blood as a whole.

Making peace with the Tau'ri eventually was the right decision, but he couldn't do so without killing a part of himself to do so. What remined of his mantle screamed at the very idea of it, the power beyond his reach reeling at the edge of his mind at the very suggestion that Heru'ur might not take vengeance on his father's killers. He was the Avenger, reconciliation was not part of his mantle's willing desires, but he'd not been able to touch his mantle except to know it exists since the Terms were imposed upon them.

His vision blurred, clouding the view of his fleet as he wiped at his face with the back of his hand. He hoped that he was making the right choice. Life had been so much easier when Ra had been there to guide his path. Heru'ur only needed to worry about protecting his father's interests and leading his armies. His moral imperative had been clear – serve Ra.

Was he making the right choice in this? His duty as a son was to seek the revenge that his mantle thirsted to enact. His peers would think him mad for dealing humans as equals. His enemies would see it as a sign of weakness, gaining allies to act against him as a consequence. And there was really no guarantee that the Tau'ri would even be amenable to peace.

That was perhaps the most terrifying prospect really, that Heru'ur might offer them the hands of peace and be welcomed with a dagger in the back. A pre-industrial Tau'ri military had been sufficient to repel the full might of the System Lords, if he didn't establish peaceful relations with the Fisherman and the Scholar a post-industrial First World might well unmake the Gods from the Heavens.

He'd ordered his Jaffa to welcome the Tau'ri on any of his worlds they might visit. Hopefully he could distract them with hospitality for long enough to discourage whatever enmity they might be feeling in the moment. They seemed generally content to harass Apophis and Chronos, and he was glad to continue that status quo.

Eventually perhaps even peace would be possible. But for now Heru'ur looked out his window at the half-fished fleet, knowing that he would soon toss even more of the galaxy into the Hell that was war.


	8. Chapter 8

Tjenenyet was living in a state of near perpetual terror. She'd never been a particularly well connected goddess - her husband's decision to sell her as part of his terms of surrender to Heka had been as close as she'd likely come to power or relevance in the goa'uld courts. She lacked beauty, guile, or a fertile womb to make her of strategic relevance - a fact that she'd weaponized to protect herself from involving herself within the politics of the Goa'uld pantheons.

Ambition was a game for those with resources and armies. One could live for millennia in obscurity while "great" empires died for glory. She'd been the consort of three Lords this far, and had been expecting to be claimed as the spoils of victory by whomever defeated Heka. She was only one of many sub-lords, but she was afforded greater lattitude by her new concubinadge than her previous arrangement.

In fairness "consort" was a title of political convenience rather than one of physical or emotional obligation. She'd never warmed the bed of any Lord to which she'd been attached. Tjenenyet had a superb talent for brewing drinks stiff enough to rob even a god of his potency, if not of his will. Once inebriated to the degree that memory was beyond recovery she only needed to wait for the next day to tell her husbands of their "magnificent performance" in bed to meet the obligations of a wife. Their egos sated, she then went about her business in peace.

She'd even gone out of her way to select hosts that, while striking, did not appeal to the standards of physical beauty favored by the Goa'uld Lords. One only needed to choose a host slightly beyond the favored preferences of one's Lord to avoid their potential lust without the added lubrication of alcohol.

Given her most recent husband's perverse hobby of raising humans from childhood to mold them into perfect disposable enjoyments, she'd not even had to even expend that much effort. Heka was content to ignore her as long as she oversaw his mine and brewed enough beer for his armies. But since the sudden change to his mantle and the constant state of war in the Kindom of Nekheb, a summons to the palace from her reborn husband was inevitable.

Or at least it ought to have been. Tjenenyet understood that the coronation was not something that made sense for her to attend. The Winter Queen held no love for Tjenenyet or her former husband Montu, but she'd expected a summons out of mere formality just to demand her pledge of loyalty.

But it never came. She wasn't even in disfavor with the court of the Lord Warden. She was nothing within it. Disfavor would be an upgrade because she could at least beg pardon for the offense she'd committed. Heka hadn't ever been an especially invested patron, but he'd at least pretended that she and the other sub-lords of Nekheb were part of his dominion.

But not only was he actively disinterested in Tjenenyets dominion as of late, he'd tasked Jaffa with the role of ensuring the proper quotas of naquadah, grain, and beer as though it were unmonitored. Her immediate inclination had been to slay the Jaffa in question for having the unmitigated gall to ask her to account for the lack of production but she'd been unwilling to risk a close quarters confrontation with the heavily armed and armored Unas shock troops they'd brought with them. The brutes were too stubborn to realize that they were dead until after disemboweling the one who killed them.

It was boded ill that the Jaffa of Heka's inner circle felt comfortable addressing her as an equal. Generals within Jaffa armies were afforded greater familiarity than was traditional for an inferior interacting with their God, but Tjenenyet had never ever seen the degree of horrifying casual comfort with which the inner circle of Heka's Jaffa warriors seemed willing to treat her with. Simply put, they weren't afraid of her divinity. They met her eyes without even pretending to look away from her.

She wasn't entirely confident that she'd be able to administer corporal punishment upon the armies of Heka without the Generals' consent. Given that she was outnumbered by Jaffa soldiers by 35,000 to one on her outpost that left her in a more precarious position than she would have cared to be in. What in the name of the ancestors was Heka thinking?

She sat in her throne room feeling entirely superfluous to the flow of conversation as she listened to Jaffa generals from the Third and Ninth fleets got into a discussion of their planned advance into Chrono's territory. Her presence was a required formality, but she couldn't help but feel wholly out of her depth as the warriors discussed the nuances of supply chains and long term logistics in a way that bored her to tears. She envied the younger broods of Jaffa - those young enough to have been spawned after the mortal limitations of the Terms were imposed upon them. Those old enough to have been spawned when the Goa'uld first began the Empire had been forced to learn the nuances of modern warfare techniques through trial and error. Upstart gods could stand upon the teachings of their progenitor without fear.

Tjenenyet had never been relevant enough to require her to learn any particular degree of talent for warfare or logistics. Even at the height of her power, as a goddess granted the ability to manipulate the universe at her fingertips, the King of Gods had relegated her to the role of celestial beer mistress. So she stood next to the table, saying little and doing her best to maintain the illusion that she was keeping track of the seemingly random details with which the Jaffa troubled themselves.

At least the human auxiliaries of the Third Fleet seemed to hold the proper degree of reverence for her craft if not for her station. The fair haired human soldiers and their leather clad commander had thoroughly availed themselves of her cellars, imbibing the beer, wine, mead, and liquor she'd been stockpiling for the past thousand years. She didn't appreciate their Asgardian nickname for her palace but having somebody appreciate her was enough to tolerate them calling her "the beer mistress of Valhalla."

She was willing to tolerate many such indignities given the human General's near religious devotion publicly embarrassing the Jaffa Generals by demonstrating how much cleverer she was than they were. Given the rudeness with which the Jaffa had been treating her, watching someone inflict the same idignity upon them was greatly refreshing.

"This will not work, Generalfeldmarschall Tor'kal." The General shook her head emphatically. "You will lose many soldiers for virtually no gains."

The Jaffa commander's eye twitched. "I have fought campaigns for longer than your entire society has lived General Winter. And I assure you that we will be victorious."

"Und if you are not pig-headedly determined to win that victory at the cost of the blood of thousands we can take that fortress two weeks later without loosingk nearly as many men, munitions, or putting ourselves in a place where our opponents can easily tell from where our attack has come. I tell you that mortars from the tree line paired with a rapid insertion of forces is far superior to a brute assault." She tutted her tongue irritatedly. "We have no need to blindly rush through the Eye of the Gods."

"The planet is too well guarded for us to arrive by ship. We'd be blown to pieces by the defense satellites unless we bought a fleet and I can't safely do that without opening us to Moloch's counter offense from our last advance." The General disagreed emphatically. She was utterly butchering the Goa'uld language, her words punctuated with her native tongue seemingly at random. The Human auxiliaries of the Third Fleet were extremely capable warriors, but they conceptually seemed to struggle with the idea of people not innately understanding their own native tongue.

"Generalfeldmarschall Tor'kal, we have no need of either." The human general scoffed. "The Furlings assure me that they can get our troops into place without difficulty and they have agreed to tolerate Iron in their realms for the duration of our passage."

"You are too willing to trust the Furlings." The Jaffa General replied, a slight snarl to his voice that Tjenenyet felt justified. She knew that there were furlings allied with the armies of Heka but she had been blissfully spared of their presence thus far. The faster the assault was planned, however, the faster these interlopers would leave her world.

Tjenenyet spoke in a firm tone. "The Furlings do not lie. If they offer safe passage, they mean it."

And if they were lying, it would still get them off Tjenenyet's world.

The human grinned wolfishly at the goddess before looking at the Jaffa General. "I promise you Generalfeldmarschall Tor'kal, you can trust in the word of the Furling as soundly as you can trust in my own."

Tor'kal's eyes narrowed. The Jaffa seemed to regard the human the same way one might a pet viper, safe only when kept under observation and treated with deadly caution. He replied with ice in his voice. "Indeed."

"I believe that concludes today's buisness." Spoke the General in charge of the Ninth Fleet, cracking his staff on the ground twice. "We will reconvene in four hours to discuss this further."

Tjenenyet's blood boiled as the collected Jaffa and auxiliaries left the table without first asking her leave to depart, but she couldn't address the insult without admitting that she was insulted. And she couldn't politically afford to make a fuss given how unsure she was of her standing within the court of Heka.

She blinked in realization as it hit her that she was not alone in her throne room. The human general was still standing next to the table, nursing a mug of beer in one hand as she tapped a pair of leather gloves against her shoulder with the other. Tjenenyet growled in annoyance. "Was there something you required?"

"I have never met a god before." The woman replied in a voice of measured calm. "I am in no hurry to end the experience. I have many questions I was hoping to answer."

Tjenenyet blinked. "You want to… ask questions of your God."

"I want to ask questions of a god certainly. I'm at least willing to entertain the concept of your divinity after having sampled your brew." The human replied glibly enough that Tjenenyet sincerely considered the idea of slaying in spite of how pleased she felt it would make Tor'kal.

"You try my patience mortal." Tjenenyet crossed her arms, allowing her eyes to flash.

"Yes, I have seen this before. I have seen the powers you claim, they did not prevent us from defeating Nirrti when first we came to Himmel." She waved away the Tjenenyet's display of power as she drank more beer, smacking her lips in satisfaction. "As I said, the beer was already more impressive. I want to know why the Lord Warden scares the rest of you."

"I am not afraid of Heka." Lied Tjenenyet, unable to convince even herself.

The human snorted into her mug. "Clearly you are not a goddess of deception."

"You realize that I can kill you with a wave of my hand?" The Goddess curled her fingers around her hand device, flaring the weapon brightly.

"Mortals can kill me without much effort, oh ye Goddess of the Brew. We're fragile creatures." She held up her mug. "And I think you would not do me the disservice of killing me before I've had the opportunity to finish this. Wasting something of this quality would be a grievous sin."

Tjenenyet laughed. "Are you attempting to flatter me into allowing you to live?"

"I had hoped." Replied the human as she shook her tankard. "Or at least to allow me to drink another stein before you slay me."

Tjenenyet rolled her eyes, grabbed a waterskin full of the brew, and refilled the human's vessel. "Be glad that you amuse me."

"If the brew continues, I shall play your fool for as long as I may." The woman waggled her brows exaggeratedly.

"You are mad, mortal." Tjenenyet spoke, her voice softening in exasperated amusement. A metallic ring of laughter chimed in her tone in spite of herself. "I will satisfy your curiosity if you satisfy my own."

"Oh?" The human cooed in surprise. "And what can this mere mortal offer her better?"

"Your icon marks you as a devotee of Kali or Ganesha… perhaps even Brama or Sura, but your men walk around speaking in tongues of the Asgard while serving the Pantheon of Ra." Tjenenyet reached over to pinch the red armband over the woman's black, leather coat. "Exactly which God did my Lord Heka offend or entreat to enlist your services?"

"Deutschland kneels before no one save the Führer." The woman balked at her suggestion. "We are not bound by the superstitions of old or the foolishness of the Far East."

"And yet you find yourself in the presence of a Goddess. Are you perhaps foolish to continue to dismiss our divinity as mere superstition." Tjenenyet drank from the waterskin. "While fighting in the armies of a God."

"We fight for Himmel, not for your Zaubergottkaiser." The woman shook her head. "Our alliance is one of necessity, not of choice. Without the aid of the Warden's Jaffa, Himmel would be a province of Moloch's realm. Given the relative indignities of serving the Warden versus serving Moloch, I will gladly subordinate myself to Reichsprotektor Zaubergottkaiser."

Tjenenyet couldn't find any fault in that logic, though historically subordinating oneself to Heka rather than Moloch could be at best described as a lateral move for human females in his service should they catch his attention. The fair haired woman in front of Tjenenyet seemed likely to soon discover the folly of her hubris in serving him.

She shrugged it off, it was not her place to correct the mortal's misapprehensions. She'd figure it out eventually and it was really no affair of hers what happened to the chattel. "Very well - then I will answer your question as best I may."

"Danke schön." Replied the human general.

"We don't fear Heka." Tjenenyet chose her words carefully, opting to go with a measured truth rather than an outright lie. "Not any more than we fear any man in power. What we fear how ambition can over-reach the limits of even great men and how those of us who are less than he can get swept up in its wake."

The woman smiled sadly. "You sound like my Pater. He often spoke of the mision to Himmel as such. 'A grand design in which we were swept.' But we flourish in spite of the winds of fate taking us in directions we'd never anticipated. Should not the gods flourish as mortals do?"

Tjenenyet took another swig from the waterskin, finishing the brew within. "Mortal, you are too young to truly understand the winds of fate. It is easy to ride the swell when one cannot live till the breaking of the waves and get swept up in the undertow."

"Then I should learn from my elders - over another brew perhaps!" The human held up her empty mug hopefully.

Tjenenyet laughed. "Come foolish mortal. You have amused me enough to open one a cask of something worth drinking."

"This was not sufficient for your taste?" The woman queried reverently.

"That swill?" Tjenenyet laughed. "Child - that was brewed by one of our apprentices barely a year into his training. He was barely old enough to be allowed to sip his own brew. Let me know you what a master of the craft can produce with millennia of skill behind it."

"My men will never forgive me if I don't at least ask if they can join me." General Winter looked out the door to a cadre of grey uniform wearing soldiers.

Tjenenyet rolled her eyes. "Only if you promise to leave offerings at my temple commensurate with this indulgence."

"Dear Lady Tjenenyet, if imbibing this ambrosia is your sacrament, you may well convert all of Himmel before I leave here." Winter replied.

Tjenenyet smirked. Perhaps something productive could come from today after all. The woman pocketed her gloves in her black leather greatcoat, pulling at the neck of it to allow hot air to escape the constricting garment. It was obvious that she'd dressed for effect rather than practicality, there was no sane reason for someone to be wearing that much clothing on a desert world. Tjenenyet's own choice of clothing consisted of a wig, jewelry, and a sheer wrap around her waist more as a demonstration of opulence than a functional garment. The Himmelites seemed to have a particular aversion to nudity that she found impractical in chattel.

General Winter seemed to realize the futility of wearing the garment under Tjenenyet's uncredulous gaze, pulling the leather from her shoulders and laying it across the back of a chair. Her grey uniform underneath was heavily stained from sweat, thought that too was quickly evaporating now that it was no longer confined beneath the black leather. "I confess that I am accustomed to this heat. I was born on Himmel, even at the height of summer it never gets this warm."

"You are too familiar with your betters, General Winter." Tjenenyet replied in equal parts amusement and anger.

"A german woman is forced to interact with the likes of a Goddess to find her betters, my Lady Tjenenyet." The woman pulled a pair of spectacles from her pocket, covering her eyes with shaded glass to protect from the sun's glare. "I am unaccustomed to meeting my betters to even know how one should act. Surely you understand the situation?"

Tjenenyet let out a throaty laugh. "My, but you are the arrogant one."

"Arrogance is the provenance of lessers. I am General born of Himmel - not some quivering Judenratte." The woman snorted.

"Judenratte?" Tjenenyet queried, unfamiliar with the term.

"My apologies, I am still learning the Goa'uld language…" She thought about it. "I speak of one of the lesser breeds from the old world. The followers of Moses, undesirables who we've done our best to rid ourselves... "

"What do you mean, "rid yourselves?" Tjenenyet spoke in a voice of utter horror, memories flashing back to doors coated in Lamb's blood.

"I was not involved in the mechanics - mind you - but my understanding is that they had a very sophisticated process in place for removing the vermin." Winter shrugged. "I would imagine that there are a few remaining pockets of them who the Fhurer was unable to take when he conquered Earth, but they should be nothing but a memory now."

"You… you tried to kill the disciples of Moses." Tjenenyet repeated the phrase in uncomprehending panic. "And felt the need to brag about it while under guest protections in my palace?"

"I do not understand the confusion. What are you doing!" General Winter yelped in surprise as Tjenenyet screamed, grabbed her forcefully and shoved her hand into the General's mouth to prevent her from talking further. Tjenenyet contined her forceful grip on the general, even as she bit the goddess' fist, looking up at the ceiling as profusely apologizing. "She means no offense! This error in judgement will be corrected immediately! I do not presume to touch that which is not mine! Please do not associate me with this madness!"

The General extricated herself from the goddess as she continued to babble up at the ceiling, offering every apology and prostration she could think to throw skyward. Tjenenyet was one of the few who remembered what happened in Egypt when the slaves had rebelled under the banner of Moses. She was extremely unwilling to draw the attention of the entities with which Heka had recently aligned himself.

"Du Flachwichser! Why did you do that?" General Winder spat out the naquadah laced blood before gargling with beer to wash the taste from her mouth.

" I will not repeat the mistakes of Ra's arrogance! You are no longer my guest! Your people are not my guests! I offer you no hospitality in my home! If you ever speak a word that would risk bringing the rage of Moses down upon my kingdom, I will end you in worse ways than you ever imagined coming from Moloch." Tjenenyet blasted the ground in front of the woman as her men rushed into the room with weapons drawn. "Leave my palace - and know that you must beg supplication if you ever wish entry again. Beg it from me and apologize to the spirits of those you've taken from the Children of Moses. Do that and you will be welcome in my house."

General Winter looked utterly betrayed as Tjenenyet aimed her hand device at her. "Leave. Now."

Her soldiers had the presence of mind to drag her away even as she shouted insults at the goddess, cursing her for having insulted a "proud german woman." Tjenenyet thumbed the control device on her wrist, locking the doors after the departed before activating the communicator to speak with her Lo'tar. "Itu."

"Yes mistress." Replied her servant immediately.

"Cut off the Human auxiliaries from the Third Fleet from all alcohol entirely." Tjenenyet spoke words she never believed she'd find herself saying.

"Mistress?" Her Lo'tar queried, unwilling to disobey but baffled at the order. It went against her very nature.

"Just do it." She spoke firmly, deactivating her communicator. If the Himmelites were willing to risk the judgement of Moses after just a few beers, she didn't dare find out what might happen if they were properly drunk.


	9. Chapter 9

Heka's new choice of lifestyle was perplexing on levels that Enlil hadn't previously imagined. Other than his scrupulously public use of magic to solve every problem, it was as though Heka had been deliberately avoiding any choice one might have previously expected from him. But given that Heka could now apparently see the future, it stood to reason that some irregular behavior would be inevitable.

The demon queen of Winter met with her pet seer regularly to confer with him about his visions of the things to come. She asked questions about the arcane and the mundane, but the First World presided over her queries. They often, but not always, met in secret to discuss her interests. He eavesdropped as much as he dared, trying to determine the newfound source of the Lord Wardens control of the future and what it held.

Her questions seemed to revolve around a place of monsters and horrific violence, where vampires and worse preyed upon mortals with impunity. A place that even the Lord Warden chose to speak of with manifest fear and regret - Chicago. The word was absent any records he could find, regardless of his repeated attempts to spell it phonetically, meaning that it either wasn't part of Hekas databases or, more troublingly, it had been removed from every written and digital record to which Enlil had access.

And there was only one reason Enlil could think of to explain the wholesale erasure of that information from Heka's library, the Terms. Enlil didn't recall the specific conditions of the surrender, presumably as a byproduct of the geas binding him to the obligations of the pantheons not exiled beyond the Outer Gates. He often wondered if he'd agreed to the limitations placed upon him, usually in concert with wondering what the exact limitations placed upon him actually were.

One discovered the limitations of their own portion of the Terms largely by trial and error, and his own inability to remember his own bindings was a tailor made torture. He was cursed to seek, and eternally fail, to restore his former position as the head of a Pantheon.

He'd turned from the folly of his people too late to save his pantheon and barely late enough to save himself. He remembered the shame of prostrating himself before the System Lords, confessing how badly Anubis' plans had gone astray and admitting that even the Jackal couldn't control what had been unleashed by his children. Even after Eden's kiss, the Jackal couldn't stop it all. He remembered the rage and the madness as the Jackal fell and had to be restrained, but he could not remember what came next.

Well, that wasn't entirely accurate, he supposed. He did recall Ninlil's glee at his humiliation, her glowing eyes shimmering behind the cat-like slits of her Furling host as she walked back into the lands of Sun and Snow. She had promised revenge for the failings he couldn't even remember, and she'd done everything to fulfil that promise ever since. For most Goa'uld the fear of reprisals from the Furlings was an abstract threat, an idle worry for millennia after the terms were imposed.

Enlil had spent every waking moment in terror of Winter's cruel humors as his wife brought its chaos down upon him. He could not eat anything but the blandest and most unpleasant of foods for fear that his dinner might bite him or burst into flames. He could not sleep without a guard present or he risked being beaten by an angry horror in the shadows. He could not keep anything that she could not find a way to take from him.

His entire empire whittled down to nothing as the ungrateful bitch schemed and lied, corrupting his pantheon with weakness and greed. Tiamat's bid for power was almost inevitable. Before Enlil even knew what was happening he was at war with his Pantheon and the System Lords at once. He'd remained loyal to Tiamat and the few offspring not exiled after the Terms before realizing that she was on the verge of a second Folly.

He betrayed her to the mercies of Marduk in an effort to retain his life, if not his holdings, only to quickly realize that Marduk was as dangerous to his allies as his enemies. It had been pure luck that Marduk hadn't killed Enlil - the madness of Marduk had gone too far by that point. He'd been brought into the capricious carnivore's temple, only for the Goa'uld to sniff him twice and burst into uncontrollable fits of laughter.

He'd spoken in mad prophecies to Enlil, chittering and gibbering in languages that Enlil feared from the time of the Folly, even if they were no longer languages he could speak, before banishing Enlil to the lands of Ra.

The King of Gods granted him succor and sanctuary, and for a time Enlil was safe – even if he was neither content nor satisfied in the role of a subordinate. Ra's mantle was sufficient that his wife dared not anger one so powerful, especially not when she was in disfavor for having defected to the Winter Court during the Folly. Enlil did not feel relief in his heart when he heard of Marduk's horrible demise at the hands of his people. The peculiar poetry of Marduk's reported doom stank of Furling meddling and a wife's old grudge.

So, when Ra's holdings descended into Chaos, Enlil followed the winds – knowing all too well that he would not survive without powerful patronage. Apophis had been willing, but not entirely able to provide adequate protection. There had been several near misses while he served Ra's opposite, one requiring the use of a Sarcophagus for nearly a week to repair entirely.

The time after Apophis' defeat had been dark days for Enlil. He'd switched hosts in the hope it would discourage Ninlil's violent pursuit, casting aside the body he'd worn in true godhood for just a few moments peace as he crawled through the dirt as he listened to his Ohnes body's screams of death as furling hounds devoured it. A body he'd worn for time immemorial, his last true connection to what he'd once been, and he'd thrown it away as a distraction. Near blind and terrified, he'd possessed beasts and birds to flee furling hunters for months till the opportunity arose to flee through the Chappa'ai.

He would go mad fleeing for the rest of his life, but there were few patrons he felt confident were able to protect him. Sokar was dead. Apophis had been barely able to fend off the Furlings even before he was embroiled in civil war for control of Sokar's hell. And while Yu was capable of protecting Enlil, there was nearly as much bad blood between the Enlil and Yu as there was between Ammit and the Blood Born.

So it was that Enlil, Lord of the Storm, found himself the subordinate to a madman who appointed a Furling bound in bone to his second in command. He was, however, the only god in any pantheon who had the blessings and protection of the Winter Queen. Through the Lord Warden's service, and that alone, that Enlil was able to sleep at night without fearing that he would wake up and come face to face with Furling eyes as a Furling knife plunged into him, spreading his heart's blood. He hadn't seen Ninlil since the Terms, but he knew she was always there. Watching, waiting, planning – she would kill him or he her, and the odds favored the former.

He would stay with this "Lord Warden" and he would obey him, following and learning as much as he could in the hope of one day replicating the Lord Warden's path out from under the terms. One day, hopefully one day soon, he would find out how Heka escaped the terms and find out how to become his own man again. There would come a day when he could live as his own person rather than hiding behind the skirts of more powerful gods.

There was some small solace in knowing that he was at least serving his elder, a term applicable to few living beings in the galaxy. The thought of subordinating him to some upstart was nearly as bad as the idea of fleeing his wife for the rest of eternity. Almost, but not entirely – Enlil was a survivor.

For today, surviving meant meeting his patron's capricious requests. It had been two months since the victory of Nekheb, and the Lord Warden was declaring a day of celebration. It was so oddly specific in its requirements that Enlil was quite convinced that it had some ritual power beyond the mundane benefits of increased belief.

The Lord Warden was quite entirely insane, but retained a peculiar consistency to his insanity and a dogged loyalty to those who indulged his whims. He was infuriatingly stingy with slaves and holdings, but curiously free with knowledge. Enlil had been placed in a position of power and trust within his new pantheon almost immediately, without first demanding any sort of pledge of loyalty or imposing barriers to action through either mechanical or magical means.

He was under constant surveillance from the infernal skull who sat atop the throne and the Jaffa appointed to guard Enlil, but while he had only limited control over the actions of the Jaffa their role as his protectors appeared to be their sincere purpose. Their presence wasn't an implied threat, it was a courtesy. Even the skull's constant surveillance of the Warden's palace, holdings, and accounts wasn't a personal affront. His presumption appeared to be that force would not be required to keep the elder god loyal, and Enlil found himself in the infuriating position of being unable to dismiss that assessment as accurate.

Enlil held up a glass bauble in curiosity, trying to determine why the Lord Warden had been so specific in his requirements. It didn't appear to have any unique properties that would benefit ritual magic as he knew it, nor was it modified with any technology he'd been able to detect. He'd exhausted every way he could think of to analyze the multicolored glass that he dared, and considered several options he didn't before just reconciling himself to the idea that he would have to wait and see along with everyone else.

The Lord Warden had commissioned them from a series of local glass blowers, electing to – frankly demanding to – pay the artisans rather than requiring their work as tribute. He hadn't understood the logic of it at first, but – as most acts of the Lord Warden transpired to be – it had been such a shrewd ploy Enlil could scarcely believe even after seeing it enacted. It took a while for the merchants to realize that the Warden's offer wasn't some sort of odd test of faith, at which point they got into the most confusing haggling Enlil had ever witnessed.

As they offered him lower and lower prices, he offered them greater and greater rewards, eventually telling them that a price well above the value of any glass was what he would pay. A simple exchange of currency quickly became a parable of how offering your abilities to the Warden unselfishly reaped massive rewards, in this world and the next. The merchants profits weren't nearly as great as those earned by the Warden's reputation.

It also seemed to spur on a competitive edge of the merchants that he'd not quite seen before. They seemed entirely determined to outdo each other's work, crafting glass animals and items with complexity far beyond Enlil's expectations for what a mortal could do without the assistance of technology. They made rearing animals and dancing women, Jaffa and gliders, tables laden with food and drinks to go with them, and so many other glass representations of the things that they felt were best in life.

They were delicate things, bound with small lengths of gold chain that felt as fragile as the glass they held aloft. But they were beautiful beyond Enlil's wildest expectation, things to match the most opulent of gemstones.

Yet another prize for the Warden.

The Warden's insight into the mortal mind might be even more keen than that of Lord Yu, he so regularly seemed able to interpret the mercurial and guttural utterances and expressions of his chattel. He was an artisan when it came to manipulating his slaves, engendering such pathological loyalty that Enlil was quite convinced that Chronos would be forced to slay any populations he captured wholesale rather than risk them cross-pollinating belief structures with his own. How could one break the indoctrination of a population who accepted their god's dominion by choice?

He placed the glass bauble gently back into the crate it came in, softly placing it upon the bed of straw and nodding in approval to the slave who'd brought it in. "The Warden will be pleased."

The slave beamed at the compliment, bowing differentially to Enlil before scurrying out to assist the other household staff in completing Amun's orders. The Lo'tar of Dre'su'den seemed to be the only one that the Warden had entrusted with his full vision of what he wanted completed, and he was guiding the entire household in near military precision to reaching that end product. Enlil crossed his arms, toying with his beard's tight curls as he inhaled the powerful odors of their preparations.

This was to be the first major festival after the Lord Warden's coronation, and it would set the tone for how one celebrated in the lands of Nekheb. After the bacchanal that had been the coronation, even Enlil had to admit that he was quite looking forward to the Warden's planned celebration as the odor of mulled wine met his nostrils.

The Warden had provided recipes to his household, earthy foods full of honey and cinnamon as well as dishes focused around poultry and pork, animals that had been transplanted from the First World in great enough numbers that they were near ubiquitous. Yet another shrewd choice, his people would doubtlessly try to imitate their Lord's celebratory queues.

The poultry was spit roasting above the fire-pits in the great hall as thiry Jaffa wrestled a massive conifer across the stone floor. It was a titanic spruce, tall enough to touch the ceiling of Nekheb's throne room once it was stood up. The Lord Warden's cadre of orphan children had been given the task of selecting it, and would soon be responsible for placing the glass baubles upon it. The Lord Warden had been explicit in that, it was the children who would hang the baubles on the tree once, and only once, the Lord Warden himself was able to supervise the activity.

"Do you have any idea what he's up to with this one?" Enlil queried, turning to the Eater of Souls. The ancient Goa'uld looked up from her meal, a bloody hunk of meat that she was devouring with her talons rather than using any sort of cutlery, and snorted as she shoved the bleeding chunk into her maw.

"Did you forget who the Lord Warden's primary allies are?" She replied through a gore-strewn bite. "He's celebrating the Winter Solstice."

Enlil's eyes narrowed. "Winter isn't for another six months."

"It is on the First World, and that's what the Courts use to determine their division of power and labor." Ammit sliced off another hunk of meat with her talon, sucking the juice from it before swallowing the whole bite. "The tree is a nice touch. Something that even Winter can't stop from growing and thriving."

"Palm rushes?" Enlil asked, recalling one of the rituals of the Egyptian priesthood while they'd resided upon the First World.

"Palm rushes." Agreed Ammit. "Though the symbolism is a bit more Asgardian for my taste."

"I'm not thrilled with a celebration of the Kingdom of Snow." Enlil chewed his lip. "The Warden is already tied too closely to the Winter Court."

Ammit grunted in what might have been agreement as she cracked open a long bone and scraped out the marrow with a talon. "I'm mostly just bothered by the figures he keeps erecting around the palace. They're ghastly."

The Lord Warden had taken to the curious habit of wetting sand and rolling it into abstract figures. Each figure consisted of three balls that got increasingly smaller as one went from the smallest to tallest. He placed smooth stones up the center ball like buttons, and along the "face" of the figure to form eerily smiling visages with sticks for arms and long vegetables for their nose. But it was probably the hats that were the most unsettling part of the figures. He kept putting hats atop them then having the children name them.

Sometimes the Warden even spoke to the figures as though he were speaking to a man… Enlil feared that he might be imbuing them with some sort of special power to spy upon his court, and went out of his way to avoid them as he avoided the living diorite statues he knew to be sentinels for the palace.

"Who did you get for the gift exchange?" Ammit queried, casting the empty bone upon the floor. She was referencing one of the odder elements of the Warden's celebration, yet another hat based oddity of the Warden. Always hats - why was it always hats? Regardless, every member of the Warden's household, save the Warden, was ordered to write their name on a scrap of parchment and place it into a hat. It was then shaken, and every person who removed a scrap of paper was expected to get a gift for everyone else in who'd placed their name into it.

"The Jaffa." Enlil replied, pointing to the ancient warrior that always seemed to be present within the Lord Warden's inner circle. The wizened old coot was actually riding the tree in imitation of a chariot rider - pretending to whip along the younger Jaffa warriors as they dragged the conifer along the floor to the glee of the panoply of children that seemed inescapable in the palace as of late. The disdain in his voice was only partially due to the perceived indignity of a god having to provide a gift for his inferiors.

No, he was mostly annoyed at the Jaffa because he couldn't think of a proper gift. The gifts were limited to no more than than the price of six eggs from an adult hen, something that even the poorest in his kingdom could afford without beggaring themselves even briefly. Gift givers were required to somehow be specific to the person to which they were given.

And other than his blessings, which felt woefully inadequate if all others were to be exchanging physical items, he couldn't think of anything worth giving that met the limitations. And he was not about to be made to seem mediocre by comparison to some slave with a proper idea for a gift.

But not only had he been unable to even read the only recently literate scribbles of the Ancient Jaffa's attempt to write out his own name, he had been utterly at a loss for what to provide the man with that he might actually care to get. The Jaffa's life consisted of waking, eating, exercising, training, praying, and sleep. If he had a vice or a preference for anything other than extremely dull sessions of Kelno'reem, Enlil hadn't seen it. He didn't even seem to partake of even the bitter tea most Jaffa imbibed before that, and forewent the normal incense used for meditation.

Enlil wore his frustration with the entire process on his sleeve as he tugged at his beard, asking "And you?" to Ammit in an effort to deflect the conversation from his own deficencies.

"The Skull." Ammit replied. "Easiest gift ever. I'm just going to sit down for an afternoon and answer his inane questions with honest answers. He's been trying to get the story of my time fighting the Blood Born for about a year."

Enlil blinked. "We can do that?"

"What?" Ammit replied through a mouthful of meat, coughing briefly as a bone lodged in her throat.

"We can just teach them something and have considered to be a proper gift?" Enlil replied, grinning as he looked down at the primitive scribble of the Jaffa's name. The Lord Warden had only recently lifted the prohibition on learning to read and write for those outside the clergy. While there was a budding society of autodidacts - little existed in the way of formal education.

"Well… yeah, remember he said, 'It's the thought that counts.' He wants his followers to be looking for non-materialistic solutions to giving a present." Ammit tossed the picked carcass behind her and wiped the gore off her face with a napkin. "He is looking to curb greed but foster comradery in his household."

"And while words are free, knowledge is priceless." Enlil beamed, stroking his beard in thought. The most boring men often made the most able students, and he had observed the Jaffa attempting to copy script from one of the Scribe's primers in an effort to learn how to read and write. He smiled - his gift would not one to be beaten or shamed by the those of his lessers.

"Would you care for some of the mulled wine Ammit?" Enlil asked, feeling the mounting anticipation for the gift exchange two days hence. "I'm starting to feel quite in the festive mood."


End file.
